Preview vs. Render

cdemerit

So lately, I've been getting some odd situations where The Character is loaded, and the clothes look great in the preview, yet when rendered, the poke through is so bad it's unusable. I've also had some strange artifacts come up in rendering that didn't show in the preview.

I know some of this is simply the nature of the beast, but are there any settings that can be adjusted in the preview to tame it some? or I just doomed. It is difficult to make adjustments to the clothing when you can't even see that there is a problem.

mjc1016

The poke through sounds like smoothing/collision isn't finished 'processing' before being passed off to the renderer...I think turning 'interactive update' off on the smoothing will help with that.

What kind of 'strange artifacts'?

What kind of shadows are you using and which renderer?

If it's 3Delight and Deep Shadowmaps...then you are hitting the long standing, infamous bug. You'll either need to alter the camera angle or switch to raytraced shadows.

SixDs

Mjc1016 has offered suggestions for correcting the problems with the renders and I may be be able to address the other issue with the preview window. Unfortunately, there is no way to make the preview more like the finished render or vice versa. The preview window is rendered for screen display differently than the final render, so it simply is not WYSIWYG. Having said that, without completing an entire render to see if there are issues, the spot render tool is your friend. It is one of the tools displayed as an icon above the preview window (mouse over and you'll find it). This tool allows you to select small areas of your scene and will render pretty quickly if the area is small, displaying the results onscreen. Checking here and there in this way should identify any serious problems most of the time.

BeeMKay

You also can "supervise" your render by using the aux viewport window.
Select the tab Window, and there Aux Viewport. It will open a small window similar to your regular viewport, but with an extra feature.
It's called "IPR" and gives you a pre-render of your image as it would look later when youdo the real render... just smaller.
To start the feature, click the "IPR Play" button, I marked it in the image below. Your current selection is marked yellow; in my case, Ihave turned the IPR off after rendering the preview.
It's recommended that you hit the "Stop" button while posing and such, unless you are on a really fast and pro system, as it will render any pose change and such that you do, slowing down the process or even crashing the system otherwise.

I've also added a "Before, during & done" IPR render screenshot for illustration.

cdemerit

mjc1016 said:

The poke through sounds like smoothing/collision isn't finished 'processing' before being passed off to the renderer...I think turning 'interactive update' off on the smoothing will help with that.

What kind of 'strange artifacts'?

What kind of shadows are you using and which renderer?

If it's 3Delight and Deep Shadowmaps...then you are hitting the long standing, infamous bug. You'll either need to alter the camera angle or switch to raytraced shadows.

Thank you, unfortunately the "interactive update" was already off... playing with collisions helps some, and there are a bunch of other things I can do, including fixing the small holes in Gimp post-work. I was just hoping there was a way to make the poke through more noticeable before rendering...

As far as the "artifacts"... Well a little more hunting, and I believe I solved the two that come to mind. I think the first one is just a corrupted file, as the scene renders with all these little "L"s over everything, yet a copy of the scene was fine.

The second one was my fault. When changing some stuff, I used the wrong Specular and SSS maps, making what looked like a tattoo in a funny place. fixed both of those, and no more problem.

You also can "supervise" your render by using the aux viewport window.
Select the tab Window, and there Aux Viewport. It will open a small window similar to your regular viewport, but with an extra feature.
It's called "IPR" and gives you a pre-render of your image as it would look later when youdo the real render... just smaller.
To start the feature, click the "IPR Play" button, I marked it in the image below. Your current selection is marked yellow; in my case, Ihave turned the IPR off after rendering the preview.
It's recommended that you hit the "Stop" button while posing and such, unless you are on a really fast and pro system, as it will render any pose change and such that you do, slowing down the process or even crashing the system otherwise.

I've also added a "Before, during & done" IPR render screenshot for illustration.

I wish to thank you for this, I'll try it out.