OTOY Forums

I found it a bit sad that the user can either pick a material or render a region. If you work on a rendering and check details you often get to a point where you want to keep render region but also pick a material. Most be a natural workflow of Modo. So if possible, it would be cool if render region works more like a looked state, that don't get disabled by using a different picker.

If the plugin allowed material picking while render region is enabled, how would it know if a mouse click was for a material pick or a render region click? Possibly if render region is enabled, and then you enable material pick, mouse clicks are assumed to be a material pick and not for the render region. Then you would need to untick material pick to adjust the render region. It gets a bit confusing then if you have material pick enabled, render region disabled, and then enable render region - what would happen if you mouse click - is it a material pick or render region? The current method is safe, because it makes it unambiguous to the user what mode they are in. But this is easy to change - I just worry that the user gets confused because they don't know if they are in material pick or render region mode. This is particular important if your replace "material pick" above with "focus pick", because accidentally focus picking will restart the render, and you might not want that. So it has to be very clear to the user which mode they are in.

Paul

I want both working together too, if possible.

Well I have off course no idea how thats technical possible, but for the workflow I would see render region not as a picker, but rather a tool.
So enable it, draw a region and the tool will be inactive, but the region stays. It would need a second button to disable it, or shortcut, etc.
It also wouldn't influence the other picker, except that outside the region the image is not up to date.

How would the plugin know that when the users clicks the mouse button, they want to specify the render region or the material pick?

ctrl/alt/shift modifier or right click. Also would be great if you could surface pick while in Viewport Navigation mode

I guess if you had 2 separate icons on the toolbar, one for material selection and one for region render setup.

as Maestrorobertus said, clicking once on the render region icon activates region selection (the icon could highlight in this mode). Once the user has selected a region it, the render-region is created, and the tool deactivates. This way, the 2 functions never interfere with eachother.