Really need a History Buffer in the Render Window

[Greg]

Title kind of says it all. In pretty much all other renders you can drop your latest render in a 'history' buffer that you can refer back to for comparison's sake (or do an A/B compare with a slider, etc) or save if you want to. It can be quite difficult at times working with Octane when you want to compare texture render settings to a previous render without having to jump out of the host App (or Octane Studio). Yes, we have a render region (which is great) but we really need a history function as well. Maybe look to V-Ray for inspiration here.

best,

Greg

[Goldorak]

This is actually in C4D Plugin - which plugin are you using? We are looking at bringing the best IPR feature to core and all plugins as soon as we can.

[Greg]

I'm using the MODO plugin. Great to hear you're working on improving the IPR...a history buffer is certainly pretty essential.

[funk]

Yes I agree. This is essential.

In Modo, I have actually started learning Qt/Python/PySide, messing around with my own image viewer that does this by saving octane renders and loading them into a separate window. It's hacky though.

We really need something integrated in the core/plugin/viewport.

[funk]

Here is my "work in progress" prototype image viewer for Modo. I only just got this working a few days ago.

It looks fast in this video because the image is small. When you have a larger render, it can be really slow to load into the history buffer though, because the code has to SAVE out a PNG from the plugin, then load it from disk.

If the Octane API allowed plugin devs to copy the image to clipboard instead, it would make copying images to the viewer faster. Its not a real EXR/Passes viewer, since the Qt version that comes with Modo has no EXR support.

It's also not the fastest thing in the world since I'm using Python.

I would like to see something like this right in the Octane viewport!

NOTE: At 00:22, I shift click the second thumbnail, which puts my viewer into comparison mode, with a slider that swipes left/right

[Greg]

Nice Funk. Yeah, something along those lines. Easy store, recall and compare (A/B slider is great). V-Ray is moving forward with full-blown compositing abilities in their framebuffer...would be worthwhile to take a peak at what they're 'doing.

-G