dribble attempts to convert as many trueSpace / Lightworks attributes as possible. Deviations are noted here, as well as instructions on enabling some of the more advanced rendering features
Under trueSpace 7, dribble can only see your scene from the Model side, including animation. As the trueSpace 7 SDK is added to, this will change in future dribble releases.
The "Raytracing Max Depth" parameter in trueSpace does not need to be as high as it usually is. When rendering with dribble, you should keep this at around 2 to speed up your renders.
Any image files that are used in the scene, either for materials or for background etc. must be converted to a RenderMan®-specific format. They will be saved in the same directory as the original texture with a .tdl extension, so make sure that your textures are not stored on read-only media.
When rendering to Photoshop PSD files, dribble automatically enables the separate output of channels such as diffuse, specularity, reflections, etc. for compositing. At the time of release there appears to be an issue with 3Delight itself that is creating slightly invalid PSD files, as opening the output in Photoshop CS2 or CS3 results in the layers being locked for editing with no apparent way of disabling this. The workaround is to copy each layer to a new layer. To composite the image as it was rendered, you should set each layer's blending mode to Linear Dodge (Add).
Polygonal faces with holes will be automatically triangulated (the renderer can handle faces with holes, but some instability was noted so conversion is now forced)
Subdivision surfaces and NURBS will be rendered natively, leading to much smoother results. It should be noted however that UV mapping does not always translate the same for NURBS - if this becomes a problem, you should extract the polygonal surface in trueSpace and either delete or hide the original. With subdivision surfaces, only one material per object is supported.
There is no concept of "subdivision levels" when dealing with real subdivision surfaces, so adjust accordingly while you are modeling. RenderMan renderers generally prefer subdivision surfaces over polygons - you may get better results if you convert your polygonal mesh to a subdivision surface and set the sharpness of all edges to 10 - it should look the same as a polygonal mesh.
Metaballs will be rendererd out in their polygonal forms. This may change in the future, for RenderMan® renderers that support "blobbies"
When using shadow maps, the scene has to render the scene once for each light so there will be a noticeable delay before rendering.
"Deep" shadow maps are automatically created, allowing the full use of transparency without raytracing.
Due to a quirk in the trueSpace API, shadow map sharpness can only be specified as Low, Med, High - the numeric value is ignored.
Shadow maps can be used with all lights, though local lights have to be pointed to face the right way (like a spotlight). Local lights and infinite lights will thus not cast the same shadows as with Lightworks when shadow maps are used.
Area lights act "real", so the falloff setting (none, linear, squared) is always treated as squared. That means that just you really have to crank up the intensity - in a simple little test scene, 20 isn't uncommon. It might have to be higher if the area light is further away in a real scene. (In tS5 such high intensities will blow out the real-time view completely, but that was addressed in 6 and 7)
Projector lights are not square like Lightworks
The following light types are unsupported:
Goniometric
Image-based (use environment lighting instead)
dribble will automatically convert most common materials to RenderMan equivalents. There are some features that are best accessed via custom shaders however, so see this page for details.
Layered materials are not supported. Work will progress in this area for later versions of dribble.
All shaders will translate, but any procedural texture will be converted to a plain texture map automatically, so "solid" textures will be incorrect
Most shaders will render as expected, but a couple of shaders and parameters have special effects:
translucent plastic - using this shader will enabled sub-surface scattering to simulate materials with real depth. This will certainly slow render time, but will look quite effective.
caligari metal, caligari metal enhanced - when reflections are used, they will be colored the same as the metal surface. This more accurately represents the real-world properties of reflective metallic surfaces.
The following are unsupported and will render as plain objects:
conductor
chrome2d
wrapped anisotropic
wrapped circular anisotropic
environment map
environment
wrapped woven anisotropic
shadow catcher
any custom shaders
Plain transparency, transparency maps, and filtered transparency maps should all render correctly, although when colored textures are used there will be a difference to the Lightworks results.
Only the "image" type is supported, and should work as it does with Lightworks. The important point to note is that if the "filter" checkbox is checked, true displacement mapping will be enabled instead of just bump mapping. This can look a lot more effective, especially on NURBS and subdivision surfaces, but may slow down rendering especially if raytracing is enabled. When using true displacement, you will typically want a fairly low amplitude setting.
fog - only the "regular" type is supported, not "ground"
The following are currently unsupported:
snow
simple volumetric
advanced volumetric
image - "filter" and "animate" have no effect
clouds - will render as the "background" color
Motion blur is only generated for regular object transformations, e.g. moving, rotating, and resizing. Skinned objects will not currently show motion blur for animated bones.
Different framerates are now supported, but you will have to manually match them to your scene. For example, if your scene is set to playback at PAL rates, make sure you select PAL (25fps) in the dropdown box.
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