Integrated Rendering View and Rendering Workflow Improvements

S

summarity

New member
As a new user, one of the single most painful aspects of Cheetah is the "render manager" and it's lack of features and integration into the software. Using a separate window to view renders slows me down massively between iterations and even with keyboard shortcuts set up (where possible), it's just a hassle.

So a few suggestions:

Integrate rendering into the actual main application. Why isn't the render view just another pane or tab I can add to the main window (either tiled or as a tab)? This would enable two very elementary features. First, navigation. This has been mentioned plenty of times, but was never addressed. Use the gestures already available for the 3D or Node editor to zoom and pan across rendered images. The second is preview rendering, viewing your effects live, which speeds up any workflow. Preview rendering unlocks so, so many workflow benefits. Previewing any change becomes a breeze: designing a material? preview it's effect live, changing light intesity? preview its ... you get the idea.

Rendering presets: Currently, there's no way to switch between "preview" level renders and full renders. Please allow us to set up presets or levels so that a quick render can be triggered (or is triggered live in line with the suggestion above), and a full render can be triggered separately. I may want to change multiple rendering parameters between these levels and doing so manually is tedious. Also mentioned before, though I don't think this has to be automatic. Also why can't I assign a keyboard shortcut to "stop render", and why doesn't the "show render manager" shortcut also work for dismissing it?

Spot rendering (mentioned before), would also work best when used in an integrated rendering view with a "preview" level: allow selection of areas to render at "full detail" level. Indigo does this really well (they call it "flexible region rendering"). Sometimes I just want to check a particular thing, like a caustic or shadow cast by something to validate my full level rendering settings, without waiting for the entire scene.

And finally, and much less important: network rendering (also somewhat mentioned before as resumable renders). I model on my MacBook Pro, but I want to send stuff to my Mac Studio for rendering since it's a lot faster. Currently working around this using screensharing and iCloud, but having an instance of Cheetah run "headless" on the render server and getting the results back locally would be awesome.
 
Hello summarity,

Since one request per thread is the preferred way to post feature requests, this reply is specifically to your request to integrate the Render Manager “into the actual main application”…

In short, I certainly hope not, at least exclusively.

In the thread multiple monitor support it is suggested that, perhaps, the render manager could be either a pane or the separate window it is.

Having it both ways is likely a non-trivial amount of work.

You asked, “why isn’t the render view…”

The reason I do not want integration into the main window to be the _only_ way is because I keep the Render Manager open on a second monitor, nearly filling the 1920 x 1200 screen. With a render in progress, it is easy for me to click copy and paste the clipboard into Photoshop for whatever examination I’d like to do. So I don’t have some of the issues that you experience getting a quick look at a render in progress with the current setup. On the other hand, restricting the Render Manager to being only a part of the main window would be a big step the wrong direction towards Cheetah 3D taking advantage of multiple monitors.

Perhaps better shortcut access to the Render Manager or a script would be most helpful for you without breaking other’s existing workflows.

cheers,
gsb
 
Interesting note: One of the recent OS upgrades allows me to use my iPad as a second monitor. However, even though I can drag Cheeta3D's Render window to a different Desktop window on my M1 Max MacBook Pro, it won't allow me to drag it to the iPad window. Not a big deal, I'm very accustomed to jumping around between Desktop spaces.
 
AHA! Tried a different sequence and got it to work. However, because the iPad resolution is lower, it scales the window down a bit, and the render preview becomes even smaller. The good news is my script/service which copies the active render to the clipboard and opens it Preview still works nicely even with the Preview App in its own desktop space.
 
Happy new year to all,

Another thought on this… One of the wonderful features of Cheetah 3D is the ability to have multiple projects open simultaneously.

Being so, one or two things would have to happen for it even to make sense to incorporate the Render Manager into the “main application”…

#1 would be to lose the ability to have more than one project open at a time. — This would be a large step backwards.

#2 would be to have multiple Render Managers, one per project. — Don’t know about anyone else, but I strongly prefer to find all render jobs, from all projects, open or not, to be grouped into one “manager".

In other words, the “main application” as the OP put it is really NOT the main application, it is the window for a single project.

And lucky for us, there can be many such projects open at the same time.

Given all this, it does not seem to make sense that the Render Manager be anything other than it’s own window.

Thanks and cheers,
gsb
 
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