[Bf-interface] Request/UI inconsistency: Different outputs for Open GL Render/Final Render

blendercontact at shadowmaker.nl blendercontact at shadowmaker.nl
Mon Jun 19 11:42:41 CEST 2017


Hi,

I am not sure if this is the right place to bring this up, but since 
it's something that happened because I didn't interpret the UI correctly 
I feel it might be.

Here's the situation. I had animated a hi-poly count octpous tentacle. 
It looked good and I rendered it out in Cycles, lots of SSS etc. So 
rendertimes were considerable. When I played it back I saw some things 
in the animation that I thought could use some improvement. So I started 
tweaking the animation, but since the tentacle was hi-poly I couldn't 
get a real time playback in the viewport, so I couldn't assess if the 
animation was actually better.

So I chose Open GL Render Animation to get a quick preview. I was 
shocked to find out that the output of Open GL Render Animation 
overwrote the carefully rendered Cycles renders. I never realized that 
the Open GL actually saved its images somewhere.

Of course this was user error, on the other hand it's also inconsistent 
UI behavior IMHO.
You see: for final renders (shortcut F12) there is the render section of 
the Properties panel, the attributes of these change depending on 
whether you select Blender Internal or Cycles and there is a very 
clearly labelled output tab with a folder and everything.

To me it doesn't make sense that there is no seperate output option for 
Open GL renders.

It's a seperate entry from 'Render Animation' in the 'Render' menu. It 
doesn't work with F12, it's not a 'render selection' option from the 
'Blender Render/Blender Game/Cycles Render' from the dropdown menu.
So for me it's not logical for it to use the same output folder.

In 3dsMax there used to be a preview/final render option. Something 
similar to this would make sense to me for Blender's Open GL Renders. 
Nine times out of ten this will be used for a quick 'playblast' not for 
final renders, so it shouldn't end up overwriting final render files, 
unless the user explicitly tells it to.

Should this belong to another mailing list, I'll gladly post it there.

Sander de Regt

ShadowMaker SdR
The Netherlands



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