Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 20-77: Rendering in Sasquatch.
When you are making test renders to
check hair color, specularity, and so on in
SasLite, you have to actually render the
scene over and over in order to tweak
things. This encourages you to stop at
“good enough” instead of spending the
extra time to get to “great!”
With Sasquatch, you can click the Pre-
view Mode button in the Pixel Filter, and do
one render. Then Sasquatch uses that ren-
der to allow you to play with the colors,
mapping, and shading in very nearly real
time, so you can tweak them until they're
just what you envisioned, without spending
much time at all. You can move from object
to object, and instance to instance, and
never have to do another preview render,
while you tweak and balance everything
until it's perfect.
Much like VIPER, the Sasquatch pre-
view can't accommodate changes in
geometry (length, clumping, combing, and
so on), so it's not perfect. But it can still
save you quite a lot of time over the course
of a project.
In addition, if you are tweaking some-
thing other than the fibers, for instance the
texture of the ground under the grass, you
can freeze the Sasquatch render so that the
plug-in will hold the fibers in memory, and
just apply them, which only takes a
moment. You can see what the ground will
look like with the fibers on it, but without
the render hit for those fibers. Once again, a
great time-saver.
With SasLite, if there are enough polys
that the plug-in decides to work in two (or
more) pieces, it does. There's nothing you
can do about it, no matter how much RAM
you have. And, of course, splitting the ren-
der like that, although it uses less RAM per
piece, takes extra time.
With the full version of Sasquatch, you
can determine how large the RAM cache is
(in MB) so if you have enough RAM, you
can render any amount of fibers in a single
pass, once more saving time.
