Shaderlight forums

  walzo March 2011
  Hi,

  I didn’t see a thread collecting feature suggestions elsewhere, so I thought I’d start it off. First of all, it’s a great product. Quite useable right out of the box.

  But of course anything can be improved. After using the Mac version for a few weeks now, a few ideas have occurred to me:

  -More progress information could be provided during a render, such as an estimate time of completion, and a more accurate overall progress percentage. On large renders the window typically says ‘40%’ the entire time on my system, and does not update as it goes along.

  -Sketchup tends to hang while transferring larger models to the render engine, rather doing this process in the background with a progress indicator. This happens even on higher-end computers.

  -Although I’m in favor of keep the render options somewhat limited, a slightly more complex ‘advanced settings’ tab would be helpful (including settings like anti-aliasing quality). It’s a little frustrating that all the quality settings are lumped together as one slider.

  -Editing an existing light seems a little buggy right now. After opening the light dialogue, I typically have to create a new light, then delete it, before I can select an existing light and get its status. Often the dialogue says ‘no light selected’ even when I have selected a light.

  -Spotlights would be a great deal more useful if the focus was variable, ie sharp or soft (referred to as ‘beam’ and ‘field’ angle in some modeling software). I don’t currently see an option for this.

  -The ability to edit multiple lights as a batch would be helpful.

  -The distinction / relationship between light-emitting materials and ‘area lights’ seems unintuitive. Ideally one would relate to the other, ie an LCD monitor in the scene, textured with a light-emitting material, would emit light corresponding to the texture.

  -Entertainment designers would greatly benefit from pattern templates in spotlights (ie ‘gobos’).

  -Perhaps this is out of the entry-level scope, but a separate bump-map texture option would be awesome (rather than inferring it from value).

  Developers: Please let me know if I’m mistaken about any of these issues in the current build.

  Users: Any other ideas?

  Rich March 2011
  Hi Walzo,

  Thanks for your input, I’ve passed all your comments onto the developers.
  Most of what you’ve suggested is already being worked on and should be included in our releases some time this year.

  I’m particularly interested in your comments regarding the render progress and issues your having with light editor…
  Would you mind emailing .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) (so we don’t bog this thread down) with some details of what you’ve done to initiate these issues as I haven’t seen them.

  Thanks.

  henryBGH March 2011
  Walzo: I think the 40% you’re seeing is the percentage the current render view is zoomed. If you mouse wheel up until it reads 100%, it should bring you to the actual size of the render.

  And not to hijack the thread, but I’d love to see a pause button for doing a render. It’d be particularly helpful if it could pick up rendering even after SketchUP/ShaderLight was shutdown (or crashed).

  NicoR1977 March 2011
  Hi all,
  I personally would wish to get a ‘Clay Render’ preset overriding material and lighting properties. Should not be too difficult to implement, I guess. What do you think?

  Rich March 2011
  This is all great stuff guys and I can assure you everything your suggesting is passed onto the developers.
  We’ve talked about a pause render feature previously, I just wondered when and how you would use this feature?

  Bluesy March 2011
  I have a suggestion for the Mac version. At present there is no way to pan or enlarge the rendered image as can be seen in the tutorials. Is this a problem that is going to be fixed? I may have asked this before and someone suggested ‘ctrl’ and pan, but this doesn’t work.

  Rune Lyngby March 2011
  I agree with henryBGH about a pause button. I have plenty of RAM (16GB) on my mobile workstation but when RAM is used up rendering a complex model it really slows down. It would be nice to continue rendering a temperary renderfile with fresh memory after rebooting. Maxwell Render has this possibility i think..

  Rich April 2011
  - cmd/apple key and the scroll wheel zooms in the Shaderlight window.
  Full info can be found in our help manual - https://artvps.com/media/appleonlinehelpSU/index.html?zoom_and_pan.htm

  Thanks for the comments on pausing the render. I’ve passed it on to the developers.
  If you’re running out of memory I would suggest using the Tiled Render mode. That reduces the amount of Ram you’re using significantly…

  wyatt April 2011
  I would second the request for a progress bar so I would have an estimate of when my render would be completed, and a fix for the Light Editor so I don’t have to close and reopen it each time I add or edit a light.

  I also have several suggestions. (I apologize if these have been mentioned before.)

  1. Lights automatically on new layers. There are times when setting up a scene that I need a raw SU export. If I’ve added SL lights, it makes it difficult to get a clean line drawing. I’d like new lights to automatically go on a new layer so I can freeze them all if necessary.

  2. Adjust exposure on Tiled renders. Maybe I’m missing something here, but I would really like to be able to adjust the manual exposure on completed renderings when using the Tile function. Right now it seems I can only adjust when using Auto, which isn’t good for high-quality renders.

  3. Real-time updates within nested components. I know SL has real time updates in the render window, but sometimes it’s like SL gets stuck or confused. This happens most often when working within nested components. After the component is closed, the rendering window does not update all the components globally, or the component instance being edited is completely missing. Closing and reopening the render window seems to be the only way to fix this currently.

4. Tool tips. Currently when I mouse over the various settings in the Material dialog, the same message about selecting a material and finish appears. I would like a brief description of each material and finish to appear instead. There are great tutorials that explain what the various settings do, but it would be very helpful if I didn’t need to memorize all the settings or leave the SU window to watch the videos again.

5. Dynamic light editor. I love the ability to adjust the global exposure and would also like the ability to adjust the intensity or color of individual lights after the render is completed.

I really like this product and look forward to the next update.

Rich April 2011
Hi wyatt,
Thanks for your comments.
Sorry I’m a bit confused as to your first statement, why do you need to open and close the light editor each time you edit a light? With the light editor open you should just be able to select a light and it becomes active in the SL light editor.

Unfortunately exposure adjustment on tiled renders while rendering isn’t supported yet but it’s something were looking at developing in the future.

We are very aware of some of the issues related to editing nested components and our developers are working on fixing these as we speak.

I like the idea of tool tips for all our materials, I’ll suggest it to the development team.

Thanks again for your input and support.

wyatt April 2011
Hi Rich. For lack of a better term, the light editor freezes after each new light is inserted or existing light is edited. The drop-down menu where I would select the light type is grayed out so I can’t select a new light to insert. I don’t remember what happens if I try to edit a light when its like that. I have SL only on my home computer at the moment so I’ll have to check later when I’m not at the office.

Rich April 2011
Hmm, Have you tried clicking the large button top left of the light editor, the button which shows you what the light gizmo looks like? that should reactivate the light creator tool if everything is greyed out.

wyatt April 2011
Nope; didn’t know that was a button. I thought it just showed the type and color of the light. I’ll give that a try. Thanks.