Making Changes

MELT stands for Materials, Environments, Lights and Textures

Shaderlight allows you to make changes to MELT properties without having to re-render your scene. As you change material properties, environment textures, the position and properties of lights and the placement, source and UVs of textures, the Shaderlight render will update without completely restarting the render.

Some of the changes will happen almost instantly, some may take more time as parts of the scene are retraced. For example, when a shadow-casting light is moved, the shadows take more time to recalculate than if you simply change the color of the light.

What MELTs

Making use of MELT changes gives you great time and work-flow benefits. Not everything will MELT, but many frequently used parameters will:

•	Material Properties: Diffuse color, specular color, glossiness, reflectivity, bump map, luminosity and more

•	Environment: Color, texture, projection, co-ordinates and placement

•	Lights: Location, intensity, color, attenuation, shadows, hotspot, falloff

•	Textures: bitmap, co-ordinates, placement, UV mapping

This is not a complete guide to all MELT-able properties. For a more full description please see MELT Changes.

What Doesn't MELT

Shaderlight will only restart a render if it really has to. If a change requires a retrace, Shaderlight will restart the render automatically.

Typical changes that will cause a retrace are:

•	Moving the camera (viewpoint)

•	Moving or adding geometry into the scene

•	Deleting objects

•	Assigning or replacing the material on an object

•	Changing some material properties such as the index of refraction on transparent materials, altering bump maps on reflective surfaces or making an existing matte surface reflective.

Shaderlight only re-exports the change you made, not the whole scene, so you can freely move objects or your view point interactively with immediate feedback on a coarse render. As soon as you pause, the image will continue to refine towards full quality.

Note: While Shaderlight will render the 3ds Max Perspective viewport, it will not recognize and update changes to its point of view. If you wish to manipulate the viewpoint of a render, make sure you create a camera object and select that camera in the view menu before rendering.

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