RT Viewport Engine output for Visualization?

[giacometti777]

I posted this to the BlendLuxCore Github as well but I'm posting here in case some intrepid Lux hero wants to cook up a script solution as a small challenge:

"If we could somehow export denoised Viewport frames it would be a gamechanger imo. Proper rendering looks great but preprocessing time kills the iteration process for artists - especially when many aesthetics are not represented in solid shading renders. I am currently using this hack to grab these frames and even this works a charm: https://blenderartists.org/t/cycles-dynamic-bvh/655915

Could someone even create a little script to capture the viewport window and output as stills while ticking through the timeline automatically? Ideally some alternate version of "Viewport Render" would be ideal though and definitely put Lux ahead of many other renderers for practicality (including Cycles)! Thanks for considering this! ANYTHING will do!"

[Dade]

What do you mean exactly with "preprocessing time" ? Is it only the export time ? Or it involve also some kind of cache preprocessing ?

View port rendering disable caches ? If it is just cache preprocessing, just disable them

[giacometti777]

Export time is what I am referring to! With any mesh that is complex at all it adds up quickly. No caches.

[Dade]

Export time is what I am referring to! With any mesh that is complex at all it adds up quickly. No caches.

But how view port rendering is better ? The initial export time is exactly the same. Are you looking for some camera-only animation or something like that, not involving heavy geometry or texture maps re-exporting time ?

[giacometti777]

I am totally ignorant to what the export time per frame for viewport would be in many normal scenarios.

In my case I am doing an animated camera + animated sunlamp/sky in a photoscanned church from Sketchfab (1.2M tris). This is probably why it is so much faster for me to go frame to frame in viewport. When I do F12 render the export per frame is ~10s and in viewport it is 1s.

I understand the advantage may only be there in some cases - but I still wonder if it couldn't make iterating ideas/seeing renders to make notes on much faster in early planning stages of many shots or for stuff like archviz animations in later stages too? For the work I am doing using the screen capture script is essential because I want to see the test render in 5m not 2hrs to make changes and keep building the scene.

I appreciate your work tremendously btw - this project is extremely inspiring!

[Dade]

In my case I am doing an animated camera + animated sunlamp/sky in a photoscanned church from Sketchfab (1.2M tris). This is probably why it is so much faster for me to go frame to frame in viewport. When I do F12 render the export per frame is ~10s and in viewport it is 1s.

Yes, you are paying the 10secs exporting tax only once with view port rendering (the scene is than only edited) while once per frame with the final render.

The idea to extend the scene editing to the final rendering stage has already been discussed but never been done: https://github.com/LuxCoreRender/BlendLuxCore/issues/59

In the mean time BlendLuxCore could just save the rendered view port as a frame to a file, LuxCoreRender can easily do it but you have to ask B.Y.O.B.

[giacometti777]

Thank you for the insight and relevant links! Good to know I am not totally crazy in wanting this feature in BlendLuxCore. I'm sure B.Y.O.B. has plenty to do but I'll PM them a link to this thread. Maybe they can include the viewport render export in the "Luxcore Extras" addon. Thanks Dade!