Renderitis is making progress

Hi,
the rendersettings script is making steady progress. It’s turning out to be a rather lengthy operation. At the moment the tool is capable of storing all scriptable rendersettings for VRay and scanline. Adding support for other renderengines is just as well possible, but requires a bit of hand-labour. I’m planning on adding support for mental ray later on.
Let me show you what’s happening at the moment.

The basic function is storing rendersettings. The settings are stored in “groups”. A group is similar to a 3dsMax renderpreset in the sense that it contains rendersettings which can be called upon from disk. My settings are stored in an xml though and are thus open to inspection. Only settings for the renderengine are stored at the moment, so no renderelements. Settings which are not scriptable aren’t stored.
The user can add and edit groups. So you can store different sets of settings for different tasks: draft, production, lighting, quick, and so on. You can set up the system so that multiple users share a single xml-file. A specific user can be made “master”. Roughly said: a specialist creates the settings and the juniors use them but cannot alter them.

The settings can be applied and altered from within the script. Settings can also be recorded from the scene into a group.

The script supports the use of multiple xml-files. In our situation we have different teams for still images and animations. Settings between these teams differ greatly. To avoid confusion, these teams have separate xml-files with different masters. A user can switch between xml-files by pressing the buttons.

The settings are stored in an xml-file. Each setting and renderengine has a unique ID. This opens up the door to exchange settings. I’m planning to create an import/export module. Imagine e-mailing settings between users, or publishing your favourite settings on a forum.

I’m planning on finishing up some minor issues and then start testing it in a production environment. Once I’m happy with that I’ll add mentalRay. After that I might be able to publish the tool.