I would like to present some ideas for possible renderRegion improvements, many (especially new users) might not even be familiar with, what used to be possible in the old days.
Through the USD and Solaris development in last several years, I have seen a shift from using Render view, to render as much as we can in the viewport and lately moving away from viewport to render back into Render Galery. Before we finish that loop, throw viewport render into corner, I would like to present some features, how render region might become more popular and robust tool.
Many, many years ago, I was using software called Softimage (hence why I mentioned many new artist will not be familiar with capabilities render region can have). For me, it was the only DCC I ever user render region. Purely as no other DCC was even close to what we were able to do in Softimage. It was so powerful that full renders, were not even needed.
For those who want to read, this is old documentation page for render region:
https://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/softimage2013/en_us/userguide/files/rendering_PreviewingInteractivelywiththeRenderRegion.htm [download.autodesk.com]
For those who doesnt want to have a long read I will list some features render region had:
- resize handles in corners
- 4 snapshot slots with option to compare with current render
- AOV support
- IPR
- tracking animated object
- rendering only selected object
- custom RenderSettings that could differ from main render settings
- on the fly adjustable quality slider for renders
- hide render region option
- exporting render region image to a file
- reverting scene to state of selected snaphot
- user selectable refresh modes (auto, manual, custom - like on camera change only)
- saving preferences for render region options
If SideFx would be able to incorporate some of those, we might start seeing more and more people actually using renderRegion. It would be huge improvements, we can all benefit from. It would be shame, to throw all the goodies Hydra viewport can do for us and move back to using renderGalery instead of using renderRegion, which can be so powerful, especially the combination of USD and Hydra.
If you like the proposal above, let SideFX know. More people interested, more likely we might see some updates in the future.
Martin
