Render in design layer

[lucylou]

does anybody know if there is a way to view materials applied to objects without having to re-render everything? im new to rendering and in other packages such as 3d viz/max you can see the material (although not in detail) in the model itself, without having to re-render everything. it seems a very long winded process otherwise!

[Guest]

When you render, only the active layer is rendered. If the active layer contains a layer link, then the entire model will render. However, if the active design layer is just the first floor, even though you see the 2nd floor and other information, only the first floor items will be rendered.

[grant_PD]

You could also work in OpenGL, which is pretty close to real time, and comperable to what you see in 3ds.

[Travis]

You could also work in OpenGL, which is pretty close to real time, and comperable to what you see in 3ds.

At the rist of being pedantic, the above is mostly true depending on the graphics card you have installed. "Mostly true" being very close to "mostly dead", something Miracle Max can usually work around but can fool the rest of us mere mortals.

Having said that, I like to work in OpenGL because it offloads the rendering work to the graphics card. . .which, even on my very fast dual G5, is faster than the CPUs.

Good luck,

[grant_PD]

Right. I should be more clear and point out that by "comperable to what you see in 3ds" means that you can look at your stuff textured like you can in other modelling programs, tweak it a bit and not wait too long will the screen redraws. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's "rendered."

And yes, we are talking about a process handled by your graphics card.

[Dave_Donley]

Hi lucylou:

Select a textured object, go to the Object Info palette Render Pane, and click on the little down arrow next to the texture popup menu. This lets you edit the texture while just rendering the one object. Is this what you're talking about?

Also, you can use the Render Bitmap Tool to marquee an area to render, with a low DPI for speed.

HTH,

Dave Donley

dave@nemetschek.net