'high quality' feature?

[Shredder565]

I've had to learn by fire what each part of soft image does, since there are no classes on how to use it properly here.

can someone explain to me the purpose of the high quality feature, and why all it seems to do is turn my screen black and freeze the program?

lost so many un saved edits due to accidentally clicking on this useless thing.

thanks

[Draise]

That High Quality viewport system is GPU intensive. It ups the AA (very nice, depending on your Video Card) with SSAA (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion in real time - can be grainy) with DOF (Real time Depth of Field). It previews your shaders more accurately too - including the ability to see environment map reflections and the ambient channel - with some Map based lighting tricks (realtime shadows, like that of a game engine).

But it is GPU intensive. If your scene is complex, or your shaders complex, or both, your video card will not be able to hack it, crashing Softimage and rendering it's viewport useless.

One tip is to go to Preferences, go to Display, select High Quality settings and turn everything in it off or to it's lowest setting. (Or have a better more modern video card)

If you need any more tips or help just yell.

[rray]

HQ View never seemed useful to me because you can't switch between the shading modes (constant/wireframe/shaded/textured) any more. Maybe for HW shader/game developers as some sort of preview window.

[luceric]

I've had to learn by fire what each part of soft image does, since there are no classes on how to use it properly here.

can someone explain to me the purpose of the high quality feature, and why all it seems to do is turn my screen black and freeze the program?

lost so many un saved edits due to accidentally clicking on this useless thing.

thanks

it's supposed to be a metaSL viewport, which is to say, it renders a GPU approximations of the mental ray shaders, assuming that they have a metaSL definition. MetaSL, mental mill and all things related were abandoned years ago (2011 I think)
The old toon shaders, which are from the 1990s, were not ported to GPU， so you wouldn't seeing anything if you use those. [edit] you'd probably be seeing black (or some other default color) material instead

[FXDude]

Actually It can be great position lights with shadow representations, adjust tiling or blending of textures, supports all blending modes for alpha masked layer mixes, or accurately previewing color corrects, incidence, or procedural texures live.

While it's perhaps sometimes best to initiate the view in "isolate object mode" in scenes with more materials, to not have to compile all scene shaders when entering the view, yet it got much faster in later versions as it caches compiled shaders and recomplies only what changes
(when view is active and making changes.. it recompiles all when view is activated)

Otherwise it works with most MR illumination shaders including the Arch shaders for more "specialized" realtime shading with all ports remaining texturable/pluggable, supportin, bump, reflections, transparency, AO (more gimic-y), and other things..

Also specifically for scenes with lots of reference models, it can be best to disable it altogether (Search HQV Environment Variables) as it can somehow make delays when saving scenes.

Otherwise, the Z-Zot plugin from Softimage Creative Environment v2.62 (1993) weren't ported to GPU either : P

[luceric]

I don't understand that Z-zot bit. We (well... our friends in Singapore) ported all the shaders we could afford to port to metaSL for the HQV project, and the rest of won't work. That was the point.

[FXDude]

Sorry I might have added "the abandoned" ZZot plugin from "the 90's", this time leaving out "old", "dead", or other sprinkled keywords from the mix. ;)