Forced Wire Frame / Non textured rendering for Max 8...

Is there an easy way to force a wireframe render or a simple shaded render on 
a fully textured scene? I have to submit a few animations to be graded but 
can not edit the animations too easily when it takes 3 to 4 minutes per 
frame to render. Please let me know what I need to select in the rendering 
dialog box to make this work.

Also, I have the scene set up using scanline & lighttracer, and a cloned 
scene using Mental Ray & Final Gather. Is there an advantage to using either

when rendering a wireframe or shaded render?

I think what I am going for is what you see on the special content cd's of 
animated movies, where they show you the animation in progress and they are 
just checking the movement of the characters or camera. Everything is just 
rendered as like a neutral grey tone or whatnot, like when you initially 
place an object in max without a texture.  Thanks! 

"Nick Yarsulik"  wrote in message 
news:277153.70211@82-36-17-98.cable.ubr01.smal.blueyonder.co.uk...
> Is there an easy way to force a wireframe render or a simple shaded 
> render on
> a fully textured scene? I have to submit a few animations to be 
> graded but
> can not edit the animations too easily when it takes 3 to 4 minutes 
> per
> frame to render. Please let me know what I need to select in the 
> rendering
> dialog box to make this work.

I've found a highly convenient way of producing draft renders is just 
to drop the min and max samples per pixel right down (on the Renderer 
tab). This allows me to create quick placeholder renders of the same 
resolution as the final renders, the colours will be roughly right, so 
I can start the compositing process even before the final renders are 
done.

hth