Stuff I expect in a Professional Renderer

[chippwalters]

Hi guys,

First of all, let me say I'm enjoying using this program quite a bit. It is blazingly fast. Even so, are a few things I expect from a $1000 3D app which you all are missing. In particular I want to be able to:

• pause the render to perform a task then resume the render.
• apply post render effects like lens glare along with being able to modify using color enhancements (brightness, contrast, hue, intensity, etc..)
• save to different formats from a finished render screen. Like JPG, PNG, PSD
• numerically control the camera
• save EXR with channels for diffuse, transparency, reflections, alpha, z-depth, etc..
• allow for 'catching reflections' on backplate (currently you only catch shadows)
• allow for creating soft reflections on backplate.
• support for larger resolutions than 2725 x 1538
• create different materials which are named separately from the objects. The current method of naming objects and materials the same makes no sense whatsoever.
• dock panels and windows, tear off recently used tabs

Oh, and one more item...have someone answer forum requests in a timely manner. There don't seem to be many of them and it shouldn't be too hard to have someone run through and answer them at the end of a day.

Hope the list isn't too daunting. Thea Render costs about one-third in price and has most if not all the options mentioned above PLUS it has both biased and un-biased rendering as well. Even though it has a progressive renderer which can render outside and/or inside, it no where near has the ease of use of KeyShot.

Here's hoping some of this list makes it into your newer versions! :-)

[chippwalters]

Nice work on the new 2.1 update!

Let's check the list:

• pause to render (nope)
• apply post render effects (*YES*)
• save to different formats (nope, but you can save JPG)
• numerically control camera (nope, but by clicking on the pivot point, I can now achieve much better camera control)
• save EXR with channels (nope)
• allow for catching reflections (*YES* of course you could do this before as well-- Camera projection mapping would be wonderful!)
• allow for creating soft reflections (nope, but Camera projection mapping would help here as well. In the meantime, I've uploaded in the freebies section a Backdrop ramp along with other Prims which does the trick)
• support for larger resolutions (nope-- this is more a business decision than technical one)
• create different materials named separately from objects (still nope)
• tear-off panels (nope)

But, I really do LIKE the many changes which were made-- esp the Spec Bloom and Vignetting as well as the Alt-P Fast Preview mode. Thanks for all your hard work!