Lukas Stockner is working on a new feature that may save you a lot of time in the future: by CTRL-Left clicking you can give the renderer a hint on where you'd like it to start rendering. In this way, you can make sure the piece of your scene that you're currently working on is rendered first.
This patch adds "Set Render focus" to the RenderEngine API and implements it in Cycles. Generally, the task of the function is to allow users to specify areas that they want the renderer to focus on by clicking into the rendering image with Ctrl held down. This is a bit vague on purpose to allow different engines
to implement it as it is suitable for them.The Cycles implementation reacts to this function by reordering the tiles so that the origin of the Circle and Hilbert Spiral patterns now is at the clicked position. This allows users to specify which areas should be processed next for a quicker preview and to allow to check specific off-center areas before the rendering would normally reach them.
Would this be useful for you?
19 Comments
Wow, this could be real handy! I hope it materializes and ends up in trunk!
If this comes at no cost (not slowing down anything anywhere) I would definetly like to have it in the shelf.
Some fair gain for some people and no pain for the rest. Im in.
Back in the days of Bryce 4 there was a spray render tool. Basically you selected the spray can and wherever you sprayed in the viewport would be rendered instantly. It was very handy when you just wanted to see a specific area rendered.
Great feature!
Have been waiting for something like this to arrive since I saw this quite a few years ago in 3DS Max.
It would be great if there was an optional "live mode" as well, that does not require you to click at all, but that just renders where your mouse is (unless it's not on top of the render, then it just renders regularly).
Thanks Lukas!
i guess people don't really remember or know about pressing ctrl+b then clicking and dragging to select an area to render?
in camera view it actually works on the renders. outside of camera view it just selects a portion of the viewport for render view mode
btw ctrl+b again and select the outside of the viewport/camera boundries to remove it
sure, i guess this is easier if you're going to do a full render to test how your scene looks but if i'm just testing a scene i'd rather just make a render border and shift+z.
Well, I do know aobut ctrl + B, yet I think this way it is way more handy as you can just keep rendering once you have confirmed that it looks okay.
What if you have two or three areas that you have to check. With ctrl + B I first would need to render three times before I do the full render, with this method I can just check everything during the actual render and keep rendering if it seems fine.
100% agree - they should make something what remember last render image and render new on it without clean previous results.
@DaedalJS This is somewhat different from the function "render border" of Ctrl+B...
Ex.: Imagine that you are rendering a high resolution image, you want see certain area first, you click in that region and then Cycles focuses on rendering that part and then continues the rest of the rendering.
It's like a normal render, but instead of just render from the center, you can pick the place that Cycles will render.
ps.: sorry if my explanation is confusing... my english sucks ;D
your english is fine. =)
i understood how it's different... i just don't see the actual point of it. unless it's just one of those things that only makes it feel more responsive rather than to actually be beneficial.
my biggest question here is "what reason would you skip to having it render a certain part of the render unless you're not sure everything in the scene is finished?"
if that's the reason then render borders, viewport render mode, or both, render border and viewport render mode, would be just as beneficial if not more so, providing you haven't set up your materials and render passes for easy compositing... in which case you'd have to wait for the whole render anyway.
i just don't get the point of this. it's cool but useless i think.
I've got to agree with you Daedaljs. I simply cannot think of a single time where I would use this feature. Mind you I think the same thing about the pie menu so what do I know. I think that there should be more time spent adding/improving render quality features rather than adding silly little features that 1-2 people might use occasionally. Get caustics working would be my biggest cry.
blender is open source... everyone is free to work on whatever kind of things they feel like would be a good addition.
also, just 'cause someone is working on this doesn't mean that same person would be working on render quality features.
i won't use this to preview or test what i'm working on but if i'm just sitting around waiting for a full render i probably would use it just to have it start rendering somewhere more interesting than what the middle of the image is in most cases.
I just don't get it. Why? What difference does it make as to where the render starts? If you only want to render part of the scene then do a box render.
You can now prioritize a full render. You can select multiple parts to render without exiting and resetting the border and re-rendering. Everybody just chill. If you don't use Blender for complex enough scenes to justify this, fine. But a lot of us would really like this future and use it a lot. This also for @daedaljs
we are chill, but we also don't see the point. besides i'm not sure a few people here who honestly don't see any actual usefulness in this are going to keep it from getting into trunk eventually. i mean there is something to be said about perceived responsiveness vs actual responsiveness.
scene complexity has no bearing on justification of use on this. all this really does is make full renders feel more responsive than they are, which is cool but not actually useful as it doesn't make them any faster and you'd know if you wanted to change something faster using border select and viewport render view mode. if you're trying to use a single render to tweak multiple things from that's just asking for problems because sometimes small changes can make a big difference so parts that previously didn't seem to work may not always need changing.
besides... who really renders once to tweak multiple things rather than the one thing they're working on?
Very often I will tweak multiple things with the viewport render, and then want to double check them out with a final render. If I can cut down on the number of excess tiles rendered, then that is a major + for me. I understand it might not be useful for your current scale of work or workflow, but please, I know what I personally could use.
I think it's somewhat useful, although as mentioned we already have border render and viewport render, so it's not like a top priority for me.It could save some time on really heavy renders not to have to restart after a border render after checking. sometimes a very heavy scene can take a while just to build bvh and start rendering.
On the other hand I would really die for a "refine render" tool where I could re-render or up-sample specific areas of a render without rendering the whole image.
Yeah, a render that a bit more option would be really good. At the moment you have to render from scratch and then combine the images in Photoshop etc.
Refine render is certainly more of a priority, but I would use this feature a lot as well.
Incredible. Lukas is my Cycles hero.