dribble was designed to be as transparent as possible for the experienced trueSpace user. You're not required to apply special shaders or convert all your textures or do anything you don't already do when rendering with Lightworks (or any other trueSpace renderer such as V-Ray). The best way to learn how to use dribble is to actually use it. This document provides some notes and pointers. You will also want to read notes.html and shaders.html
Make sure you are running the 3Delight license server before you start, or you'll find your renders and converted textures covered in watermarks - sometimes the render is completely black and this also means the license server is not running. It's easy to do: Start > Programs > 3Delight > Start license server (background) (you may see a black command prompt window flash up briefly, that's normal)
- Load your scene, or model it from scratch if you're feeling saucy
- Start dribble:
- Press the Render Scene button:
- dribble will then render your scene to the active window
- Press the Render To File button:
- dribble will then open a file dialog, similar to the typical trueSpace file dialog:
- Set your parameters (all of which correspond to the trueSpace settings) and press
Save
- Press the Area Render button:
- Click once to define the top-left of your area render
- Move your mouse to the bottom-right of your desired area and click again
Note that the screen may not update very cleanly while you define your area rectangle.
- Press the RIB Export button:
- A file dialog will appear allowing you to choose the filename for your exported
RIB
Currently, the exported RIB file is the equivalent of a "Render Scene"; there is no animation support, nor the setting of different output resolutions, etc. A future release will add additional functionality.
For the most part, dribble will take any necessary settings such as anti-aliasing, whether raytracing is enabled, or background color etc. from your trueSpace settings. Hopefully you can see that the theme of dribble is to make things familiar! Nevertheless, there are a few features which trueSpace doesn't support, and you will have to use the dribble settings dialog to set those.
Press the cunningly-named "show / hide settings" button to open the settings, broken up into a series of tabs. You can save and load your favorite settings to .drb files. If you wish to change the default settings, overwrite the default.drb file in the plugin directory - back it up first!
This dialog controls general renderer settings. Future expansion is planned (as long as it doesn't jeopardize dribble's simplicity) but for now there are just two settings:
- cache override During the course of rendering, dribble must do a lot of behind the scenes preparation; converting texture files, creating shadow maps, and so on. To save time, this step is skipped if dribble doesn't believe there has been a change. There will be times when it cannot detect a change (such as modifying your textures in Photoshop), so to force a regeneration you should check this box before rendering, then uncheck it again afterwards
- shading rate This can be thought of as an overall quality control allowing you to choose between quality and faster renders, but be aware of how it works! When this value is greater than 1 (the default), quality will go down but renders will be faster. When the value is less than 1, quality will be increased (particularly in reflection details, or along shadow boundaries), but renders will be slower.
Unsurprisingly, these parameters are all related to lighting. dribble will take all other relevant lighting information from the lights themselves.
- always ray shadows When checked, all your shadow-casting lights will use raycast shadows even if they are set to use shadow maps. This is especially useful when you are testing different lighting scenarios, as while shadow maps typically render faster, the shadow map calculation can be lengthy (especially compared to Lightworks)
- bias Whether you use maps or raycast shadows, sometimes you will receive self-shadowing artefacts. Tweaking this value will slightly offset the shadows, hopefully fixing the problem
- area samples Area lights and sky lights create soft shadows by sending lots of rays through the scene. Fewer samples speeds up render times, but results in a grainier lighting solution.
Ah, the fun settings! The GI panel allows you to enable global illumination for your render, automatically calculating additional light bounces and color bleeding for a more realistic result, or adding caustic reflections from bright surfaces. Depending on your settings, this can significantly slow down renders, so be careful.
- enable This is the master switch that turns global illumination on and off.
- occlusion When enabled, extra shadows will be considered as part of the global illumination. This will work well for some scenes, but should be disabled for others (such as completely enclosed rooms) as it will effectively cancel out any global illumination effects
- intensity Increasing this value allows you to "cheat" the lighting, increasing the effect of the global illumination without affecting the direct illumination
- samples Essentially controls how smooth the global illumination lighting is, at the expense of render time
- shading rate Another quality setting. Like the overall shading rate value detailed on the output tab, increasing this will speed up renders at the expense of quality. The difference is that you can frequently get away with a much larger shading rate for global illumination (say, 64 or even 128) and still keep your overall shading rate low, so separate controls are provided for each
Photons are tiny magical creatures that come out of lights to make global illumination easier, and certain effects like caustics possible. The more photons, the better the result (usually), though it does cause a delay before rendering as thousands of the little photon creatures must be gathered. "Real" lights must be in the scene for this to work, with spotlights being especially effective.
- enable caustics Checking this box adds caustic effects to the scene, visible as patches of light caused by reflections from very shiny surfaces or through glass
- amount The number of photons that get shot into the scene. The (k) signifies that this value represents thousands, e.g. the default of 30 shoots 30000 photons
- use for irradiance When checked, global illumination calculations will use photons to accelerate rendering. Whether or not this actually happens is highly scene-dependent
- more accurate This should only be enabled when using photons for GI, which is why it is placed here (if you enable this without using photons, your render will slow to a practical halt) When enabled, it allows for more realistic lighting calculations at the expense of speed, by looking at individual shaded points instead of the whole primitive when calculating reflected light. If you are seeing unexpected results with GI, such as "glowing" in expected dark areas, you may want to enable this setting. Here's an example:
You can see that the very strong light should be indirectly illuminating the rear wall, but the regular GI calculations do not properly show this, instead artificially brightening the whole area. On the right we have the increased accuracy enabled, giving the desired results.
dribble supports the use of the trueSpace environment image, allowing it to automatically show up in reflections, in the background, and even lets you generate lighting from the environment. Note that the environment image MUST be a spherical light probe in .hdr format. If you're not a trueSpace7 user (when it actually became useful), it might have been a while since you used the environment settings, so see below for the workflow. For now let's look at the dribble-specific settings.
- show in background When this is checked, the environment image will be visible in the background. This is achieved by creating a large scene-enclosing sphere automatically at render time.
- show in reflections When this is checked, the environment image will be used on reflective surfaces, even if raytracing is disabled. If raytracing is enabled, the environment will be reflected whenever a reflection ray hits no scene geometry.
- size This controls the size of the environment sphere
- exposure You can change what exposure setting is used for the HDRI background that is visible in reflections and in the background, to make it darker or lighter
- intensity Setting this above 0 turns on HDRI lighting, where the lighting is derived from the background image
- cast shadows If you wish for the HDRI lighting to cast shadows, check this box, and prepare for longer rendertimes but more realistic results
- samples The more samples, the better (and slower) the result, especially when shadows are being used
- exposure This separate exposure control allows you to have different exposures for the lighting and visible background
- Load your scene, or create it from scratch if you're still feeling saucy
- Remove any real lights from the scene
- Enable Raytracing
- Enable the global environment shader:
- Right-click the global environment button to bring up the settings dialog:
- Right-click the filename box to bring up the standard file browser. You
have to use the file browser because earlier versions of trueSpace do not recognize
.hdr files, so be sure to set the File Types to All Files (*.*) to find your .hdr
files.
- Choose an .hdr file in spherical probe format
- Set the dribble environment settings up accordingly. You will likely find that your environment lighting is very bright, so try setting your lighting exposure to -0.5 and your intensity to 0.1 to begin with.
- Press the dribble Render Scene button
It's slightly different (easier) if you're using trueSpace 7, because .hdr files are supported natively. You'll have to set the environment elsewhere though:
- Load your scene, or create it from scratch if you're still feeling saucy
- Remove any real lights from the scene
- Enable Raytracing
- Enable the global environment light:
- Right-click the global environment button to bring up the settings dialog:
- Ignoring the rest of the settings, left-click the filename box to bring up the
image browser, or right-click the filename box to bring up the standard file browser.
- Choose an .hdr file in spherical probe format
- Set the dribble environment settings up accordingly. You will likely find that your environment lighting is very bright, so try setting your lighting exposure to -0.5 and your intensity to 0.1 to begin with.
- Press the dribble Render Scene button