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You can click and drag a rectangular area to render. It's good for checking if you're getting the desired effect from shaders or shadows without having to do a full production render.
Damn. I just kept doing spot renders of Victoria 4 naked to see if she had spots.
If you have a big scene and are using high quality lighting, it can take hours to render the scene. The DAZ preview does not give you an accurate idea of what the image will look like when you render it. The spot render tool is very useful for checking the lighting levels surface properties, ect. Avoid including hair in the rectangle you are spot rendering to keep the render times down.
FYI I noticed that spot render (area render) not display smoothing well. I made a shirt and worked on weight map and even if I thought I set it as needed, all area renders displayed huge poke through same I saw without enable smoothing. I wanted to give up, but accidentally I clicked on normal render instead of area render and shirt was good and rendered well. So from now I will use area render only to check shadows and lights for a final render not for WM work.
Where do I find the spot-rendered image? I'm not asked in which folder I want it to be saved.
You cannot save a spot render...it is used to test parts of a scene with how well it looks so we don't have to wait for the whole image to render.
Aha! Thanks for the fast reply. But what do I have to do to view the result when the process window is closed? It seems that nothing had happened then ...
The window that we create a scene in is called the Viewport Window > Select Spot Render Tool > With the left Mouse Button click on a point in the Viewport Window and drag the mouse to make a rectangular shape and Release when you reach the desired size > It will then render that portion of the Viewport for viewing.
Is it possible only to render a cutout of the scene, chosen like the selected spot render rectangular shape?
If you mean to render it in a saveable format, then not really. The best you can do is use a spot render, then either use the snipping tool or hit Print Screen and copy your screen data into a separate image manually. Spot renders are managed separately to full renders.
If you save a render as tiff or png any background will be masked out, leaving only the actual items in the scene.
this is probably a thick question to those in the know - but when i save as a png i get a background (i followed the video and it said create a new primitive i added camera and lights) when i opened the image in photoshop there was a coloured background, as you can see i have alot to learn and i am not sure how to get just a clear png image so i can build my layers up in photoshop and then merge them and not sure if it´s possible but then bring the merged image back into daz?
If you apply your background image to a primitive then it has geometry, the plane, and so won't be masked. The mask wil apply only to areas that have no geometry of any kind.
Thanks Richard but your response just makes me feel even more of a newbie :( without you meaning too.
So if i don´t use a primitive would that resolve it?
once i can grasp in laymans terms what people mean as i am sooooo new to 3d i will have cracked it ! lol
Yes, if you use the backdrop command to make DS show your background image behind the render you will get a mask, but if there's actual stuff - even if it's just a plane with a background image - then DS will treat is part of the scene and won't mask it off.
I was looking up spot render and came on this thread- so here's my questions
where is the backdrop command, what does it do?
do things like the cyclorama backdrop, heart of the jungle, etc- have geometry and are saved in pngs?
Edit>Backdrop.
It just loads an image to be the background, instead of the grey/other color of the 'normal' background. It isn't 'scalable' or anything, it's just 'there'.
Anything with geometry, like the cyclorama will be rendered out as part of the image...so yes, it will show up in a png. (So will a simple plane with an image applied to the diffuse channel.)
What is a good size for a background image, so it wont be blurry? (Since it isnt scalable and fills the entire viewport. )
Hello! Stumbled upon this thread while looking for a solution to a different question. ('Why doesn't the lighting of my spot render match the full render I just finished?' Still working on that.)
The responses to the question posted above didn't seem entirely accurate, and even though the thread is really old, I figured I'd update in case anyone else was looking.
You can save a spot render. I do this after making a small change in a scene in order to avoid re-rendering the whole image (though lighting does sometimes seem to go off on me :/ )
You will end up with png where the rest of the image is transparent. Only your spot will be included, but the image size will be the same as the render settings. This is nice as you can layer the spot render seamlessly over the original render in Photoshop (or Gimp for those of us who are cheap) without worrying about placement. Some postwork may be necessary.
How to:
Make sure the camera, lighting and render settings haven't changed since the original render.
Select the Spot Render tool ( Tools -> Spot Render or Alt+Shift+C )
Open the Tool Settings Pane/Tab ( Window -> Panes (Tabs) -> Tool Settings )
The Active Tool dropdown should say Spot Render. There will be only two radio buttons under Render To: Click New Window.
Voila! When you next do a spot render by drawing a box around an area, it will render into a new window.
Disclaimer: Written for Daz 4.7 on Window. Your mileage may vary. Don't know if background images affect this - don't use 'em, so I didn't try. Besides, they moved the background tool, and I forgot where it went.
I use it all the time and I have never had mismatching lighting.
It uses the same render engine to work on spot renders as it does for the full image, so I'm really not sure how you're getting a difference in lighting. It's not something I've personally encountered in my years using Daz Studio. The spot render should be identical, it just chooses to render only one area rather than the whole image.
Do you have an example you could share?
I agree with Shawn and the others. Spot render is great for doing a small patch that needs to be re-rendered and I can patch it into a previously rendered image easily.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS!!!
Glad I could help. It does save a lot of time. :D