Twilight Render is Out

avariant

Nice... The name is a bit of... unfortunate... timing. It was picked long before the movie came out.

david_h

Well the renderer is light years ahead of the movie. . . .

Actually I figured it out.. Wow! That was scary for a moment.

Fletch

@unknownuser said:

...That was scary for a moment.

tip: The camera panel has the exposure control for you even while rendering the imageyou can adjust it.

Gaieus

@unknownuser said:

By the way. . .I must be doing something wrong. I tried to render a little house and all I got was this. . .with the Watermarks. It really sux.

I wouldn't complain about'er (though "HE" is not my kind...)

rcossoli

successful!!!!!
I have been able to charm this engine test renders, nothing more than successful and long life.

Gaieus

I posted an interview with Fletch in The Daily CatchUp. Quite interesting especially at the end where he is talking about development and plans for further features (most of what can be read about on the Twilight Forums of course but for the lazy, "this will do", too)
.

Ecuadorian

My favorite thing of the interview is that they seem to be very open to user input... and that one of the two guys behind this is an architect himself.

Fletch

Thanks guys, we are confident if people will try it, they will like it.

There are many video tutorials and a good user manual. For users that are intermediate or advanced in SketchUp who try it, in 30mins or less you will be rendering with Twilight.

sepo

Hey Fletch ...what is the score with Rovinj? Don't tell me you are Croatian?

Gaieus

Haha...

He's just living there for a change. Not a bad choice IMO (once I kick off in a business and don't have to work for a living any longer, I might also move to the Istria - or Dalmatia somewhere)

sepo

It is an excellent choice. Istria is beautiful part of Croatia. Close to Italy ,Slovenia and Austria....very good choice.

Fletch

Hi Sepo,
It's simple, my wife grew up here.
We lived in Milwaukee for 8 years, now it's "her turn"... we'll see how it goes here.
The up-side is that if you love spearfishing (which I do) it's great place to live.

sepo

Good luck Fletch. It is lovely there. Good place for sailing as well. Also close to Austria and Slovenia for skiing. I think you will find that you will want to stay.

Fletch

Being from Montana, skiing is my first love before spearfishing... so I will definitely check it out

kwistenbiebel

Don't know about spearfishing ( ) but I just tried the Twilight demo and I must say: fabulous User Interface!!!!
I wasn't expecting such a nice workflow. It is simple yet elaborate.
Some great thinking behind it.

I especially like the render settings screen and most of all the simple material setup. Just clicking the mat in the viewport with the mat sampler and the mat editor shows up. Great stuff.
Also the tool hints that appear when hovering above are life savers. Features of Kerkythea that I never understood actually make more sense now .
I am happy to see that the real time tone mapper is there and working well.

Could the Twilight developers make a similar UI for Vray,Fry and Maxwell please?

And a little question while I am here: Is it possible to acces the render settings .xml file ?
Also, if I want to use unbiased animation (path tracing progressive), can I assign a maximum render time per frame? the default of 100 or 500 passes seems overkill for some scenes.

A quick try:

Gaieus

Animation with progressive presets would indeed sound interesting.

kwistenbiebel

Hi Gaieus,
the progressive presets are in place. It is just that I can't change parameters.

An issue I am running into:
I am trying to render an animation, but each frame is rendered with the same (initial) view.
After each frame, the SU screen seems to go to the next frame (I see it moving), but the rendered view remains always the same?
[EDIT]: apparently the camera tab needs to be set to <Current View> in order to pick up the cam movement. Yeah!

Gaieus

That's exactly the issue I ran into (I thought I was going nuts already) and Chris finally told me the same solution.

Ecuadorian

@kwistenbiebel said:

And a little question while I am here: Is it possible to acces the render settings .xml file ?

The render settings .xml files are saved here:
C:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 7\Plugins\Twilight\RenderSettings

@kwistenbiebel said:

Also, if I want to use unbiased animation (path tracing progressive), can I assign a maximum render time per frame? the default of 100 or 500 passes seems overkill for some scenes.

To change the number of passes in unbiased animation presets, just look for this line near the beginning of the .xml file you want to edit and change the value:

kwistenbiebel

Thanks Miguel.
I tried animation using a medium Photon Map setting and it is quite fast.