I am currently writing out several of my patches as 4k stills for conversion to video and run into several issues with the texture writer:
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The most reliable file format so far is JPG, but it lacks a setting for the compression ratio. I’m not sure what setting it uses internally, but from the output it doesn’t seem to be the highest quality? This should be exposed.
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PNG gives me totally wrong colours and an always-transparent Alpha channel. That is wrong, since I explicitly set my clearing colour to a non-transparent Alpha of 1.0 and that should be respected. I am unable to get anything useful out of that export.
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Again, it would be useful to expose the PNG compression settings, so people can decide if the want to prefer speed or compression.
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TIFF also could use a compression setting, typical ones are LZW and ZIP. And here I once again get funny colours.
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Some other formats are just not implemented (for instance TGA) - Why have it as an option if it does not work and throws an error? That makes no sense.
TGA could actually be useful as a pre-colour-management format that usually “just works TM”. -
I would also vote strongly in favour of having EXR as a native format (again with selectable compression flavour) instead of relying on an external nuget.
EXR is the most used format for floating point rendering all over the industry so it definitely belongs in there (And HDR would also make a lot of sense for the importer, it’s the most used format for environment maps).
Until then, the available EXR/HDR nuget works, so big thanks to the author! :-) -
In all cases, either make the alpha channel a pin-choice or respect the setting in the renderers clearing colour.
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In the same context: the Stride “SceneTexture” node always shows the output with alpha, no mater what settings, so maybe this is the actual issue?
This is super annoying, since it makes it impossible to do a quick sanity check if the rendered output looks correct by dragging out an IObox.
There doesn’t seem to be a setting for it, although again, just respecting the clearing colour would basically do it. -
I assume that the image library that is used internally has all those settings/formats, so it would be great to expose as many as possible.
Other than that, it’s mostly working now that I have a setup I can copy from scene to scene, but it still is a far cry from Tooll3 where I can just open the export window and create either stills or a video automagically, even including sound…
This was basically the same all through 5.3 and 6.x previews and now 6.0.
Thanks for looking into this!
Cheers,
Tom