Compositor feedback in the Viewport ! (for Cycles/Eevee in Real-Time) !
Hello
it could be amazing if we could had a "real time" feedback of the compositor in the rendered view. Exactly the same way we adjust the contrast, gamma and exposure in the color management settings !
so basically every tweak like hue change, contrast, color correction and other really quick to compute adjustment could affect the 3d viewport in real time, to have a real- time feedback of what the post process will look like while working on the viewport, also could be a game changer for compositing with keyframes an animation.
if the compositing process is too long to be real time it could be calculating when the renderd view is finished only ! when the sample of the preview are done, some seconds for compositing and poof, heres the preview.
a simple check box "preview composite in renderd view" in the proprety panel could do the job. this could be really handy, we already have the power to change the contrast, exposure, gamma, rgb curve of the rendered viewport, why not devlopping this feature further ?
6 Comments
I fully support. This is one of the reasons why it is very convenient to use for expample Octane renderer when finding materials settings right in final shot, especially if there are bright light sources in the frame.
How would users define as "too long" for the compositing process and how would Blender's interface let them know that they need to render to see results?
* @Jason van Gumster * some nodes like color correction, contrast, hue correct, color balance, brisht/contrast, hue saturation value and so on could be real time, exactly like the actual color correction in propreties panel, so if the new output node is connected to a node tree only present with thoses type of node, blender could run them real time.
if theres a more compute heavy node, the composite view will be calculated at the end of the renderd view.
the objective of this idea is to have a similar system of some other rendere, that have a real time post process adjustement
* @dodododorian * The issue is that the user needs to know that these nodes have this capability. How do you suggest we have Blender's interface provide them a hint about that? Maybe the nodes would be colored a particular way? Or do they just have to have this information ingrained?
A typical workflow involves doing color correction after rendering. I could see it as maybe being useful for still images or quick productions by a single-person team, but I worry about it causing more confusion than benefit if this feature were added.
Something I would like to see, maybe just in EEVEE, is a per-material composite using nodes similar to material nodes. For NPR, compositing is essential to getting the right look. With viewport compositing, especially if it's per-material/per-object, it would be very easy. I haven't ever made a RCS post about this.
In particular, I tend to do a lot of color correction, which is no more complex than math/color math nodes, and sometimes I need to do it to an entire material. This is doable right now using Shader-to-RGB, but Shader-to-RGB doesn't support every shader, yet.
Of course, I would be ecstatic to see viewport compositing, too. Isn't that already on the roadmap, though? I'm sure Pablo has mentioned it on Blender Today a time or two.
So you know how when you are in render view in the viewport, depending on your samples, you can move the viewport and it will update live, but if you stop moving it, the render will "complete" when you hit enough samples?
OP is proposing that the compositor nodes would either be live, or if not live, at least wait until the viewport render is finished.
You would never have to manually render it. It would be live, or wait for viewport to finish.
With regards to the UI issue, I would use the notification status area on the bottom bar. When you go into render view it would check your composite nodes and determine if they're applicable for real time or not.
If they are, it wouldn't say anything. If it's too computationally expensive, it would say in the notification area "Compositing nodes not applicable for realtime. Viewport will be composited after samples finish. See info for more details."
Then in info it would say which, if any, nodes are wasting too much cpu.
Also note that the OP suggests there being a separate check box for compositing in the viewport. So, that warning can also be showed when enabling this feature specifically, not just on switching to rendered view.
I would really want this feature, and I think it would be perfectly understandable that you get a warning info box when switching to rendered view.