Feature request for the render window

Started by reck, February 27, 2008, 07:41:24 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

reck

Would it be possible to add an option for the render preview window to allow objects to be rendered along with the landscape, water, sky etc? Sometimes it's nice to actually see the trees, bushes, grass etc along with the rest of the scene to get an idea how it's going to look before you actually start a render.

Cyber-Angel

#1
What ever method is chosen would have to be an improvement over the memory hogging method used in Bryce which used wire-frames, which I know some have asked for in the past, the problem come when you have really dense populations of objects; single population object selection (Not currently supported by TG2) becomes a problem and wire-frame previews tend to become visually cluttered or at least form my experience with Bryce they do.

I am sure that there is a more elegant method than wire-frames, if there is I am not really sure: wiser heads then I maybe able to suggest method/s that would be more suited to the task.

I do admit that the limited tests I've done with populations some thing other than a bounding-box would be useful when it comes to populations, particularly when trying to set up back-lighting and similar lighting conditions it would take the guise work out of such tasks; in any case what ever is devised it is a no brainier that it has to be fast and have a small CPU and memory footprint.       

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel  ;D           

reck

Well I hope wire-frames get added soon as well, it would really help in object placement. I did notice that it had all ready been mentioned before though so I didn't mention it again in this post.

What I was really thinking though was if the preview window could actually render the objects in low resolution along with the rest of the scene. Again it helps to see how the objects are placed, especially in populations, but also you can get an idea of light and shadows which at the moment you can't get without rendering. So when viewing a scene in the preview windows with many objects your only really getting half the picture at the moment.

It would be nice if you there was a button that could switch views between bounding box, wire-frame and render objects

Matt

It would be really easy to let the preview include fully-shaded, fully-lit previews of the object. The current preview system deliberately refrains from rendering those objects because usually it makes the preview unusable as soon as you have more than a couple of very basic objects. It should probably be available as an option however. Other possibilities (not yet implemented) would be OpenGL shaded polygons or wireframe.

We will add more preview options in future, perhaps with some hybrid modes which could automatically switch between different modes according to object distance or object complexity. We'll spend more time on this after the 2.0 release.

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Cyber-Angel

Quote from: reck on February 27, 2008, 08:18:00 AM
Well I hope wire-frames get added soon as well, it would really help in object placement. I did notice that it had all ready been mentioned before though so I didn't mention it again in this post.

What I was really thinking though was if the preview window could actually render the objects in low resolution along with the rest of the scene. Again it helps to see how the objects are placed, especially in populations, but also you can get an idea of light and shadows which at the moment you can't get without rendering. So when viewing a scene in the preview windows with many objects your only really getting half the picture at the moment.

It would be nice if you there was a button that could switch views between bounding box, wire-frame and render objects


Low-Resolution sounds like away to go, but still memory and CPU management possibly with some kind of load balancing would still in my view still be needed (IMHO) , I like the idea of a toggle between bounding-box, wire-frame and render objects though if I might make a suggestion for the sake of a clean interface and ease of use that a list-box rather than a button. Good idea's though.  ;D

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel           

reck

Thanks for the info Matt, interesting to hear the possibilities for the future.