Indigo 2.4 - Don't Make Me Think

[StompinTom]

Added z-buffer and alpha as render modes in the indigo 2.4 gui.

Aaaaawesome.

[Stinkie]

Aye!

[ROUBAL]

Please, please,please can we finally have the option to set the default save location the igi's, etc.

I am so fed up with them filling up my c: drive - which doesn't have much spare space.

And for those that say you can set it via the exporter - this doesn't work when you use resume - and I use that a lot.

+1 ! I completely agree with Doug Armand :

I also asked for that several times in the past.

Thanks in advance !o)

[Soup]

I've had some feedback recently that when people get Indigo for the first time, they just want to take an old project and render it right away to see the difference. I think this is a great way to capture people with the trail version because they can see the potential.
I propose a function, say for sketchup, called "Best guess" that takes all current textures and Indigo-ises them as best as it can guess. Sketchup glass becomes indigo glass (that supports one-sided faces in most cases), metals become phong etc. It's possible to profile all the textures that come with sketchup to help with this.

It's kinda a dirty hack, but I think it's important for new users to see what it can do right away.

[Zom-B]

Thats exactly what Cindigo does... quite well

All materials get converted, and special C4D unique stuff gets baked and used as a texture!
Do you want some examples of included C4D scenes?! (I'm on vacation in Denmark till sunday, you can have some on monday!)

[dougal2]

Blendigo does material conversion too, though if there's any way it can be improved then let us know

[StompinTom]

Blendigo does material conversion too, though if there's any way it can be improved then let us know

Oi. I've thought about that actually, and what sometimes irks me (though in no serious way, of course) is that when I create a default material, it translates it as a Phong material when a diffuse material would be more appropriate. What if the Phong-ness was controlled by whether or not Ray Mirror is enabled? Then the glossiness parameter could exponentially control the Exponent (har har, no pun intended) and the RayMir slider could influence the IOR, or better yet, use the IOR setting under Ray Transp to set the IOR. More intuitive? Also would make converting to and from Vray materials easier, not that that is really relevant here

Is a Blender 2.5 script in development as well? How will that shape up?

[dougal2]

Is a Blender 2.5 script in development as well? How will that shape up?

Yes, though it's not likely to be public for a couple of months at least. A lot of the workflow, conversion procedures etc will still be relevant to 2.5. Getting the best out of 2.5 will be an optimisation exercise for some time much later this year - perhaps for Blender 2.6.

[Whaat]

I've had some feedback recently that when people get Indigo for the first time, they just want to take an old project and render it right away to see the difference. I think this is a great way to capture people with the trail version because they can see the potential.
I propose a function, say for sketchup, called "Best guess" that takes all current textures and Indigo-ises them as best as it can guess. Sketchup glass becomes indigo glass (that supports one-sided faces in most cases), metals become phong etc. It's possible to profile all the textures that come with sketchup to help with this.

It's kinda a dirty hack, but I think it's important for new users to see what it can do right away.

I had a similar idea at one point where I would auto-convert all SketchUp wood textures to phong, metal textures to nkdata, glass textures to glass, etc. but it got a bit overwhelming so I never implemented it.

I am a bit nervous about software that tries to do things for you automatically because you won't always get what you want (as StompinTom said). MS Word auto-formatting comes to mind....

[StompinTom]

I don't mind Indigo converting materials, at least initially. It helps when it hits close and you don't have to manually set all the texture paths and such which is a pain, just a tweak here and there.

[jcfnav]

Hi,
A little background... I been following indigo since almost beginning of times but the thing that always have keep me away was the lack of UI (I hate coding and that kind of stuff, I`m a UI guy ) now see the new direction of Indigo I get more and more interested, now seeing this topic I took the chance to put a little from my side
This is a little sketch that I had in mind and this combine with the dark theme would be good, the basic idea is have everything in tabs where you can split it or group it according to your needs.
Here a screenshot, share your ideas

Cheers
JC

[pixie]

Hi,
A little background... I been following indigo since almost beginning of times but the thing that always have keep me away was the lack of UI (I hate coding and that kind of stuff, I`m a UI guy ) now see the new direction of Indigo I get more and more interested, now seeing this topic I took the chance to put a little from my side
This is a little sketch that I had in mind and this combine with the dark theme would be good, the basic idea is have everything in tabs where you can split it or group it according to your needs.
Here a screenshot, share your ideas

Nice

[Soup]

I agree that tabs are much better than the drop-down. But I liked Bens idea of expanding tabs on one side, having everything on one side gives more room for the render.

[neo0.]

I agree that tabs are much better than the drop-down. But I liked Bens idea of expanding tabs on one side, having everything on one side gives more room for the render.

Agree. The consolididation makes everything look more clean and imo is also simpler for the user.

EDIT : the one thing that I would like to see is the ability to recolor materials. It's not always easy to tell what your color will be from your 3d packages view imo.

With GPU render, I believe we should be able to change alot of the things we can change in your 3d package (so you don't have to spend time exporting in). For instance, I don't think that you should be able to scale and model in indigo, but I do believe that you should be able to move your light sources around.. The "correct" position of your light source, again, isn't something that a user (especially a new one) can always discern from the 3D package's view.

If you think about it, indigo is unbiased and the your package's view of your scene is biased (if anything), so there's quite a gap between how things look in your 3D package and how they are rendered. If indigo is to become more user (newbie even) friendly, then it might try to bridge the gap by letting you adjust more parts of your scene in while you are rendering.

[Jeff Hammond]

i would suggest fixing this:

screen 7.jpg (7.69 KiB) Viewed 2885 times

also make ⌘N work.. i'd really like to be able to render more than one scene at a time.. or, set up a few scenes with a certain amount of time per each one.. some way to let me leave the computer for 12 hrs and come back to a few renders..


also, detaching the render settings dialog and moving it around is very clunky(?) and not of much use.. i'd say ditch that..