Tips and Tricks for M:render

[Qslugs]

Well, from playing around with Lyles Gradient fresnel sample example scene, I was able to determine that using camera fresnel along with a gradient, closely resembles cel shading in other packages. Look for my brain examples in another thread on this board.

Saving your surfaces allows them to be available in the script drawer for easier access at a later time. I have now saved Lyles fresnel gradient surfaces for later usage.

[HellBorn]

Not a tip maybe, but an exsample of fresnel usage.

I made a test replacing the color component of the carpaint material (found at the Messiah Yahoo group I think) with a camera fresnel in order to get one of those special effect car paints.

[Qslugs]

Can anyone make this topic sticky? It might be useful for a later date once the renderer starts to get a good workout from all.

Anyone doing anything new with the renderer? Any more tips?

[Stoehr]

Well, I'm sure others know F9 is used to render, but others may not know (at least I didn't know until yesterday evening) one can hit F9 a second time to stop the render in progress. It doesn't pause the render, just stops the render.

Another way: A single right-click in the camera viewport will abort and remove the image from the view.

So there's my render tip for the day.

[Stoehr]

I second the vote for this thread to "stick"!

[Julez4001]

Using M:render, I find myself cursing it more than loving it.
While features are nice the workflow is clumbersome. I hitting Ctrl-s a lot more often just to make sure things are dsaved before the upcoming crash.

Tip: CTRL - S Save -- save often

[Stoehr]

Originally posted by Julez4001
Using M:render, I find myself cursing it more than loving it.
While features are nice the workflow is clumbersome. I hitting Ctrl-s a lot more often just to make sure things are dsaved before the upcoming crash.

Tip: CTRL - S Save -- save often

That's odd. I've not crashed yet while working.

[Stoehr]

Another tip:
I discovered today that I can change the values of a gradient, by sliding the keys, during a render in progress. THis is very very handy!! I can quickly see where the In and Out points are of mid tone texture maps. I did this to find the height of the bump when trying to place a color gradient to change based on the bump.

EDIT: I found this works with all scrolling inputs, such as the material properties. In other words, one can see changes in bump frequency while rendering.

[Stoehr]

Alright, I have been experiencing some crashes when changes the Surface Thickness material attribute, and the amount of surface thickness to make it crash changes depending on what object I'm working on. For example, a ball with a thickness of 2.0 was fine, but my characters head could not excede 1.4 before it crashed messiah. Maybe this is useful for someone.

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