Rendering on a Mac - problems with Shaderlight
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Hi Guys
Just wanted to ask your expert opinion. I have been using Shaderlight rendering for the past few weeks, trialling the full version (trial period ends today). There are loads of bugs in the Mac version, which I am assured are being worked on. Things such as SU crashing when it is activated, materials not updating, not able to pan or enlarge rendered drawing etc. On the whole though, I like the program because it is simple to use and although I know Kerkythea is amazing, I find it too difficult to get to grips with.
Can anyone suggest another (simple) rendering product I could try instead of Shaderlight. Unfortunately Twilight is only available for PC, otherwise I would have used this as it too looks fairly simple to use.
Thanks
Susan -
susan,
give podium a go and you will not regret it. if you look at my website, most of what you see there was made with podium. good luck. -
Hello Susan,
I am sorry you have had problems with Shaderlight. We have seen you have been asking questions during your trial on the Shaderlight forum, and I understood that you were happy with the responses from the support team.
I accept that we do have a bug with the Shaderlight material editor in the Mac, and I can confirm that development is working on this. Using the 'CMD ⌘' key with the material editor to pick materials using the pipette tool will help with this. Shaderlight is being continuously developed and improved and we feel that feedback from customers is essential for this. Any crashes in Shaderlight we treat as the highest priority, and will work with a customer to find out what is happening and if necessary find suitable solutions.
With regards to the zooming and panning, this has been answered on our forum. So hopefully using the 'CMD ⌘' key with the wheel is working ok for you.
Hopefully you may reconsider Shaderlight, but I hope you find the renderer you are looking for.
Martin
Shaderlight Technical Support Manager -
Hi, I have another question about shaderlight. I have also been trying out the 14 day pro demo. Glad to hear that some of the performance issues are being addressed.
One thing I have discovered whilst using SU is that the materials pallets are quite different on PC and Mac. The issue this throws up is that my colleague (who works on PC) is able to adjust the brightness of his material image textures in the SU materials pallet where as I (working on Mac) cannot. This is a big problem for self illuminating materials which we use a lot. I was hoping to share files between me and my colleague but my ability to work on them is limited because of the simple way in which shader light works with self illuminated materials. I love the simplicity of Shaderlight but the SU material manager on Mac makes it very difficult to quickly achieve the results you want.
Trying to change the brightness of a material on SU is not possible (unless Im missing something). The HVS, RGB, Greyscale and CMYK sliders only allow you to change the colour of the image not adjust the brightness.
I really hope SU will put some time into bringing the material editors into line with each other soon!
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Hi - have attached a video to show what happens when I try to adjust the brightness of a material with an image texture. It seems to change the colour of the entire image rather than just adjusting the brightness. Thought it would behave like HSB in photoshop but some how it seems to pick part of the colour of the image rather than the overall image? Maybe Im not seeing something but I can't get the image texture to brighten?
Really want to use shaderlight cos it is so simple to use and the results are very good for the time taken but am finding working with self illuminated textures tricky because of limited settings and no easy way to adjust brighness.
As a further note are there any plans to incorporate batch rendering from multiple scenes or the ability to output to another render slave into Shaderlight. This would mean being able to continue to work while renders are being produced!
Any help much appreciated . . .
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[With regards to the zooming and panning, this has been answered on our forum. So hopefully using the 'CMD ⌘' key with the wheel is working ok for you.]
Martin, I have sent you an email - sorry, but I didn't see your email before posting on this forum. Thanks for clearing things up for me. Please don't get me wrong, I think Shaderlight is amazing and I know that these Mac bugs will be worked out in time. It is just frustrating when you are working on a tight deadline.
As far as zooming and panning is concerned. Holding down cmd and scrolling with the wheel zooms the Mac screen, therefore making everything larger, including the Shaderlight window, it does not affect it separately and there is no way to pan the image.
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Thank you for your posts, we are looking in to the material editor issues. We are also preparing some updated documentation that runs through the Mac Material Editor as there are some particular combinations of selections that will help you get the most out of the Mac material editor.
Samyell - Please could you repost the video, or send it directly to support@artvps.com as the attachment to the post is less than 1Kb.
Also Batch rendering is something that is in our development plan, so hopefully this is something that we will have in a future release.
[With regards to the zooming and panning, this has been answered on our forum. So hopefully using the 'CMD ⌘' key with the wheel is working ok for you.]
The default control for zooming the Mac screen is setup to be 'Ctrl' and the wheel. So if your mac has been changed to 'CMD' and the wheel then this will get priority and Shaderlight will not be able to zoom in the render window. Panning the image should just be the left mouse button.
I hope this helps, thanks for the feedback.
Martin
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Have submitted the video file via email to Martin but just so others can see it have re-uploaded here.
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