Disable Node in Render Tree

[mr Bob]

map yourself the preview key ..... under the key mapping features

b

[Stoehr]

Thanks Bob, that's pretty close to what I wanted. It's workable.

[Ablefish]

There's been some question about the stability of the Preview command, which is why it was unmapped by default a few versions ago. What I've always done is just plug that one node directly into the surface. Yeah it does disconnect whatever was plugged into the surface input, but it's only one node.

Check out the relational views too, there is a shaderball of sorts there.

[Stoehr]

I'm sorry, I'm still new to XSI. Where are the relational views? A search for "relational views" in the docs yeilds nothing relative to the topic.

[ThE_JacO]

the main issue with the preview node wasn't really stability in itself.
the stability issue spawns from the abuse some people forced it into, that is connecting and previewing masses of nodes while a rendering was still going on.

now, despite all the efforts to integrate MRay it's still a fairly intensive rendering engine, and those wipe-in/wipe-out's of so many nodes were pretty harsh on it.

the real problem is that the rendertree isn't a common placeholder like Maya's hypershade, if it's refreshed or saved with nodes unconnected those nodes are wiped out.
now, using the preview and accidentally refreshing would wipe out, often beyond undo's capabilities, whole branches of a maybe complex tree.

I hope this makes it clear why it's been made an option and not a default :)
it's a brillant option but be very careful when using it.

[mr Bob]

hey Jaco i see ur in london ...kick mr reed for me !

B

[ThE_JacO]

will do.

P.S.
who the hell is mr Reed? :)

[mr Bob]

your over at peerless are u not? with mr reed, hense the wolf pun under your pic .....

B

[ThE_JacO]

yeah, I'm TDing in Peerless, and congrats for getting the joke (not many do:) )
but I still don't know any reed here, do you maybe mean Stevie (Read)?

[mr Bob]

yup ....mr Read it is .. sorry for miss spelling his surname ..

B

[ThE_JacO]

ah alright.
I'll be happy to kick Steve on your behalf, I kick him on the back of his head regularly on an hourly basis anyway, I'm sure he won't mind one more.

[Ablefish]

Hey Stoehr, the Relational Views are new to 4.0 - can't remember if that's what you're using or not.

If you are, Check out Application->Views->RV - Material Editor. That lets you work on the material applied to a primitive (cube, sphere, cylinder or torus). Keep in mind, this doesn't help in terms of isolating the display of a single node, but it might make it possible to work on the whole tree since it's only needing to render on a primitive.

It's also a pretty good example of what you can do by building custom Relational Views.

[Stoehr]

Ah, ok, thanks Ablefish. I'm using 3.5 at this time, so I'll place the relational views on the backburner for now.

Jaco, thanks for the explanation. Actually, almost all the crashing I've experienced with XSI 3.5 is when the preview render region is set to refresh. Sometimes I'll make too many changes too fast, and it hangs, then crashes. If I change the render region to NOT refresh, then all goes well. I'm just pointing out something I've learned recently; probably not new information to most others.

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