Indigo Renderer Forum

Post 'em here. All items will be considered. However, I won't put it on my TODO list until another user gives it a '+1' (seriously)
Your requests are VERY important! SkIndigo development is directly and immediately affected by YOUR feedback. Please help make SkIndigo the best and easiest to use rendering plugin!

Whaat wrote:Post 'em here. All items will be considered. However, I won't put it on my TODO list until another user gives it a '+1' (seriously)
Your requests are VERY important! SkIndigo development is directly and immediately affected by YOUR feedback. Please help make SkIndigo the best and easiest to use rendering plugin!

Hi Whaat,

My two bits (or more) starts with these.

1. Smaller IGS when exporting from SketchUp. Write only the entities that are in the current view only.
2. Refine Skindigo animation. Tried current tutorials but are buggy.
3. Make the "Select Rendering Window" option work correctly (using item #1).
4. [License items] - Make transferable licenses for different machines. I have different slaves and masters that become available at different days. Can't render or make use of slaves because of that.

I'll add more later

Drkick16

Well i'll chip in a few

Visual

• Subtly rounded edges for buttons and menus.
• A choice of several color schemes (dark grey, blue, green, etc.)
• More clear expansion and collapsing of submenus like "emitter attributes" and "mesh attributes." The bold text doesn't really communicate that they can be expanded..

Functional

• Automatic previewing with overlayed pause and resume button.
• Dockable widgets, would be useful for UV mapping.. Maybe some sort of a new visual UV mapping tool, where you can interactively adjust maps. If skindigo evolves to give you more feedback about the changes that you make to your scene, widgets will become all the more useful. Maybe transparency previews for when you use clip maps. This would probably require more on the part of indigo, yeah.
• More clear tool tips for various texture map types.
• Tabs for different material types instead of a drop down menu.
• The ability to clone materials.
• More clear explanation of what "a", "b", "c" mean under the texture options.
• The ability to click and drag within fields to increase the value without having to manually type them in.
• Add the ability to only create one IGI per scene. When you rerender, it would simply replace the old IGI that was last used for that scene.

Hi Whaat! Thank you for this topic!
I don't know if dockable widgets would be the solution, or even if this is strictly indigo-related, but I agree with Neo0 about the need of more advanced UVmapping tools. Really.

I have no peculiar ideas of what to implement within skindigo, at the moment. I see here there are people with much more fantasy than me, so I'll leave the ball to them .
All their requests seem to be reasonable, although not so essential to me.

Thank you Neo0, and drkick!

What I had in mind was something alone the lines of Zbrush where texture mapping is a purely visual process..

Ok, I have no Zbrush experience.

BUT I have an idea! Preset procedural shaders, like noise, fractal, stripes, squares and so on..
Could be very useful for some random additional textures, like bump or exponent mapping!

Pibuz wrote:Ok, I have no Zbrush experience.

BUT I have an idea! Preset procedural shaders, like noise, fractal, stripes, squares and so on..
Could be very useful for some random additional textures, like bump or exponent mapping!

This will happen at some point. Right now I am leaning towards a type of 'shader wizard' implementation where you can set the parameters (turbulence, scale, strength, etc.) and it will generate the shader code for you.

That is really great Whaat. So that noobs like me can use ISL too.
GREAT. Thank you!

Whaat wrote:

Pibuz wrote:Ok, I have no Zbrush experience.

BUT I have an idea! Preset procedural shaders, like noise, fractal, stripes, squares and so on..
Could be very useful for some random additional textures, like bump or exponent mapping!

This will happen at some point. Right now I am leaning towards a type of 'shader wizard' implementation where you can set the parameters (turbulence, scale, strength, etc.) and it will generate the shader code for you.

Ah!
This is something I've thought about too!
I have some plans in this direction...

Another thing to improve: probably that's not SkIndigo related, but I find a little annoying the fact that when using exit portals the sun light comes from a different direction if compared to the one which SU previews. I found this "bug" a couple years ago and I don't know if it can be fixed or changed.
Now Nick is doing some tests and he still finds the error.

Pibuz wrote:Another thing to improve: probably that's not SkIndigo related, but I find a little annoying the fact that when using exit portals the sun light comes from a different direction if compared to the one which SU previews. I found this "bug" a couple years ago and I don't know if it can be fixed or changed.
Now Nick is doing some tests and he still finds the error.

Yes, fix it! thanks!!

drkick16 wrote: 1. Smaller IGS when exporting from SketchUp. Write only the entities that are in the current view only.

What is the reason behind this request? Faster export time? Running out of space on hard drive? Just wondering... I find this request a bit strange because the entities not seen by the camera still have a significant effect on the realism of the scene. If you want to just render what is in your view, just select everything in your view before you render, and then 'Export Selection Only'.

3. Make the "Select Rendering Window" option work correctly (using item #1).

You mean Region Rendering? What doesn't work? Or do you mean that you just want it to work so that only the entities within the region get exported?

4. [License items] - Make transferable licenses for different machines. I have different slaves and masters that become available at different days. Can't render or make use of slaves because of that.

You'll have to make this request to ben or nick.

I'll add more later

Please do!

Pibuz wrote:Another thing to improve: probably that's not SkIndigo related, but I find a little annoying the fact that when using exit portals the sun light comes from a different direction if compared to the one which SU previews. I found this "bug" a couple years ago and I don't know if it can be fixed or changed.
Now Nick is doing some tests and he still finds the error.

This is a long-standing Indigo issue, not a SkIndigo one. I don't think it's been mentioned for a long time, though. I can't remember if it's related to exit portals or to having bidirectional enabled.

Hi Whaat,

Would it be possible to get the NK data paths exported relative instead of absolute. There are work arounds for this but it seems that since materials are pathed relatively the NK data should be as well. The data file is already sent to the TX_ folder it just need to be set in the material settings.

Thanks,

--
Sean

cpfresh wrote:Hi Whaat,

Would it be possible to get the NK data paths exported relative instead of absolute. There are work arounds for this but it seems that since materials are pathed relatively the NK data should be as well. The data file is already sent to the TX_ folder it just need to be set in the material settings.

Thanks,

--
Sean

Yes, thanks for reminding me of this one! I will try to fix this before next release.