I wish there was an adaptive illustration that would summarize what’s going to happen when I hit render. So if ignore lights was pressed, the light in the illustration would dissappear. If the scene was volumetric, then it would show how the sorting would change. etc. Add in absorption, emission, sorting, buffers, environment etc.
I planned on mocking up some example illustrations but I figured I’d send the idea before I forgot about it.
Ben.
I was thinking about something similar, but in words instead of images.
An illustration could be worth 1K words, but we have to discuss how you envision it so it is clear for anyone.
In many cases, I render an image and then have to solve the puzzle “Why am I getting white particles where I expected green”.
So I intended to write a sort of an “expert system” where I could point at an object or the whole scene and ask for an explanation of what is going on.
It would then tell me something like “You are loading Color from the PRT file, but it is being overwritten by a local KCM which is then lost because a Material is overwriting it, but then a Global KCM comes and sets the color to yellow just to be overruled by this >Override Color with White option in the Global Render Values Rollout!” or something like that…
Really what we are talking about is a node based flow of how particles are rendered. You might connect your source node to a light node, to a render node, to a saver node, etc.
^mmmnn how FU 
Seriously a pretty damn intuitive way to go.
No, that is what we would like to use to tell Krakatoa how we want things to be processed.
What we are talking about here is something that will tell US at a glance how things will render when we open somebody else’s scene or when we did something stupid and cannot figure out why the output is unexpected. I tend to know what I am doing and still have these WTF moments sometimes until I realize which checkbutton I forgot to uncheck… Or all those “my scene renders black - is it a bug or a user error?” cases.
I’m glad you like this idea. I’ll try to mock something up when I get a chance. Its busy times here.
B.
The debug mode in the KCM is a start, but a block diagram or spreadsheet where you could supply a particle index number and have that one particle render from start to finish and have that show in the block diagram or spreadsheet would be nice. You’d be following a lot of channels of data, but only for one particle. How you present that? Hard to say. But most of the operations are fixed, right? There either is or is not a material. Is or is not lighting. Is or is not a global override for each setting. The KCM’s and other modifiers expand things, as do PFlow operators, but most of that could get lumped together. “Processed with PFlow” or “Processed with KCM (x4)” or whatever. As long as we could narrow down that the particle went in OK, but came out all wrong, we could at least know that it was a material or KCM or pflow or whatever and can narrow down our focus.
