Image View#

The Image View allows you to view, edit and render any Clarisse images. It also performs color correction in real-time, provides interactive progressive rendering and features render region.

Even if the Image View displays final images that can be saved to disk, it's not meant to render full image sequences. If you wish to render image sequences, please refer to the Render Manager section.

This widget requires OpenGL 4.0.

The image view is split in two parts, the image area and the image toolbar.

Image View

(1) Image Area (2) Image Toolbar (3) Image Geometry Statistics HUD

Image Area#

The image area (1) is where the image canvas is actually displayed. In this area you can interact with your image while it gets progressively refined into the final one. You can also select directly underlying geometries, materials etc... using tools. A HUD is displayed showing real time statistics of the image (3).

Navigation Basics#

The Image View offers the same 2D navigation scheme used by any views displaying a 2D area.

2D Panning#

To pan press Space and click in the image area using either left or middle mouse button. Drag in any direction to pan the image canvas.

2D Zooming#

To zoom hold Space and Right Button in the image area. Drag right to zoom in and left to zoom out.

The zoom factor is rational resulting in fractional pixel sizes. If you wish to snap to the nearest predefined non fractional pixel size, use Space+Z. Alternatively you can use + and - key to zoom in and out.

2D Fitting#

To fit the image to the image area. Press Space+F.

Manipulating the scene#

Since the Image View also displays scenes, it is possible to directly manipulate the rendered scene and interact with it in 3D using the Image View.

Orbiting Camera#

To orbit the camera of the scene, press Alt+Left Button in the Image View. Drag in any direction to orbit around its center of interest.

Moving Camera#

To move the camera, press Alt+Middle Button in the Image View. Drag in any direction to move both the camera and its center of interest in the view plane. To dolly the camera (move forward or backward), press Alt+Right Button in the Image View. Drag right or down to move forward, and left or up to move backward.

Fitting View#

You can fit the view to the content of the scene by pressing F. If no item is selected, it fits the view to the bounding box defined the scene extents. When one or multiple items are selected, it will fit the view to bounding box defined by the selection.

Pick Fit#

To pick an interest and frame the viewpoint, press Ctrl+Alt+Left Button in the Image Area. Drag in any direction to frame the new viewpoint.

Assigning Materials#

You can quickly assign materials by dragging and dropping a material to the items of scene directly in the image.

Adding new items#

You can quickly add scene items in your image by dragging and dropping items directly in the image.

Setting new camera#

You can change the current camera viewpoint of the scene by dragging and dropping a camera directly in the image.

Image Toolbar#

The Image Toolbar is used to set many options that drive the Image View behavior. You can, for example, control the interactive progressive rendering, the color correction etc...

Image View Toolbar

(1) Save current Image (2) Save Image Without Watermark^1 (3) Show Alpha Checkerboard (4) Show Rendering Progress (5) Display HUD Overlay (6) Limited Region (7) View Transform (8) Reset Exposure (9) Exposure (10) Reset Gamma (11) Gamma (12) Minimum Render Starting Resolution (13) Save Render Snapshot (14) Image History List (15) Toggle Bookmark Current Image (16) Lock/Unlock Current Image (17) Remove current image from history (18) Clear Image History (19) Displayed Channel Group (20) Displayed Channel (21) Visual Hint (22) Background Plate^2 (23) Foreground Plate^2 (24) Options (25)Sampling Quality (26) Image Display Mode (27) Evaluation Progress Bar

^1 Only available when using the Personal Learning Edition ^2 Doesn't operate on the build assembly images.

Image Display Mode#

The Image Display Mode (26) button controls how to display images in the Image View.

It is possible to explicitly lock the Image View to display a specific image:

• Drag and drop the image in the image area
• Lock the widget selection (see widget selection for more information)
• click on the Image Display Mode button (26) and browse for the image you would like to display.

Image Slot Display#

When the Image Display Mode is set to Use Slot, pressing 1,2,3 or 4 while the mouse cursor is hovering an Image View with the focus displays the selected slot.

HUD Overlay#

You can toggle on and off the HUD by clicking on (5). The HUD display can also be fully configured. click on the 3 dots next to the button to popup the HUD options.

Safe Frame Overlays#

It is possible to display safe frame overlays over images using the HUD Options (5). There are multiple frames available which some are user configurable.

Note that Safe Frame Overlays is a global application settings found in either the 3D View or Image View sections of the preferences panel.

By enabling Caption the overlay will display the caption or label of each frame. With the exception of the Live Area, all other frames are user configurable as a percentage of the Live Area.

Safe Frame Overlay in the Image View

Composition Guide Overlay#

It is possible to display composition guides overlays to help with your scene composition. In the HUD Options (5) make sure to enable Show Overlay and then choose any of the provided overlays:

It also is possible to flip composition guides both horizontally and or vertically using the Mirror X and Mirror Y in the HUD options. Note that Camera Overlay is a global application settings found in either the 3D View or Image View sections of the preferences panel.

Image Evaluation#

Clarisse features an On-demand evaluation system. For example, when an image is displayed in the Image View, the image is queried for evaluation. If it requires evaluation then it gets evaluated.

During evaluation, Clarisse will dynamically generate, load and render on demand everything required for the final image. In other words, geometries, texture maps are actually loaded only if needed during a render on a displayed image.

If you let the evaluation engine finish its job, you'll get the final image. Depending on the image complexity, the evaluation can take a while. Thankfully Clarisse supports full interactive progressive rendering so you are free to interact with the application anytime during evaluation.

By default, the Image View automatically triggers an evaluation of the display image if it wasn't already evaluated. It is possible to change this behavior by using the dedicated buttons controlling the evaluation. For more information please refer to Evaluation Controls.

When the image displayed in the Image View is evaluated, the status and the progress of the current evaluation are displayed in (27).

When the status button is green, no further evaluation is required for the displayed image.

When it is red, the evaluation is currently running and the progress is displayed in percentage in the progress bar.

One important aspect to know about the evaluation is that it is always on demand. Depending of what's visible in the image area, the image may be partially evaluated because further evaluation is not needed for the display.

Indeed, this can happen for example, when the image canvas is zoomed out as would a 4K image displayed like a thumbnail. When that happens, the status of the evaluation is green but the progress value that is displayed is lower than 100%.

Rendering In Progress#

By default, the Image View displays a preview of everything that is happening during an evaluation of an image. It is possible to change the default behavior by only displaying a progressive snapshot of the fully comped image.

To enable/disable the display of the render progress click on Show Rendering in Progress (4).

Limited Region and Region of Interest#

Sometimes it is useful to work on specific areas of an image instead the whole image to render. This is why, Clarisse can limit the regions to evaluate to render only a specified area of the canvas.

Clarisse provides 2 type of regions which can be controlled by the Render Region tool:

• The first region is the region of interest (displayed in green). This region is only used when in interactive mode in the Image View. In other words, when the image is rendered on CNode, the region of interest is omitted and whole image is rendered.
• The second region is the limited region which actually crops the rendered image. When a limited region is set, a blue border is displayed in the Image View to outlines the region.

Region of interest can be enabled by using the button (6) in the Image View toolbar. Limited region can be activated by checking the item attribute Enable Limited Region of the image.

Both regions can be enabled automatically by selecting the Render Region tool and dragging a new region. Limited regions or region of interests can be modified by holding the X key and dragging a frame in the Image View while having the Render Region tool selected.

You can also edit the limited region by modifying directly the Limited Region attributes of images and layers using the Attribute Editor.

View Transform#

You override the default view transform defined in the application preferences using the View Transform selection button (7). To change the default View Transform used by all widgets displaying images go to Edit > Preferences... > Color Management. For more information about color management in Clarisse, please refer to Color Management section.

Adjusting Display Exposure#

You can adjust the exposure of the display by modifying (9). It is extremely useful to check high and low values in the image. By default, it is set to 0.0. To reset the Exposure, click on (8).

Adjusting Display Gamma#

You can adjust the gamma by modifying (11). By default, it is set to 1.0. To reset the gamma, click on (10).

Image History#

The Image View offers an image history. While the list of images is local to the Image View, each entry is stored globally in the Image History of the application. For more information about the Image History in Clarisse please refer to Image History. By default, the Image History can store up to 10 different image iterations.

The size of the global image history can be controlled in the preferences panel. Go to Edit > Preferences > Image History to set Image History Size. The image history follows the FIFO (First In First Out) principle meaning that older images are replaced by newer ones. To prevent Clarisse to remove specific images from the history, it is possible to lock them.

Lock Image#

Since the size of the image history is limited to a user-defined number, it is possible to lock images to avoid them being automatically deleted when the maximum number of images in the history is reached. To lock a specific render, display it and press the Lock/Unlock Current Image button (16) in the toolbar. Press the same button (16) to unlock it.

Image History Mode#

The image history is also automatic by default. It automatically stores the final image each time it is fully rendered. It is possible to change this behavior to manually store images to the history by going to Edit > Preferences > Image History and setting Image History Mode to Manual instead of Automatic.

When the image history is set to manual you have to explicitly click to Save Render Snapshot (13) or press Space+S to add the current render to the history.

Store Render Snapshot#

The default behavior of the Image View is to store the final render to the history. However, it is possible to store a snapshot of the current render by clicking on Save Render Snapshot (13) or pressing Space+S.

Clearing Image History#

By clicking on Clear Image History (18) you can clear the entire image history of the Image View. This will also clear the images from the global image history. You can also delete a single history item by using the Remove current image from history button next to the list (17). Again, this will clear the selected image from the global image history of the application too.

Navigating the Image History#

To navigate in the image history click on (14). Latest is the latest render. You can use Page Up or Page Down to set the current image from the history. Use Shift+Page Up to select the latest and Shift+Page Down for the oldest.

Bookmarks#

It is possible to bookmark specific renders in the Image View history to easily compare renders. To bookmark/un-bookmark the current render press Ctrl+B or press on the Toggle Bookmark (15) in the toolbar. It is also possible to use Shift+B to bookmark or add the current render as the top image of the bookmark list.

To navigate between bookmarks, simply use Up and Down arrow keys. To go back to the Latest render, use Shift+Page Up.

Alpha Checkerboard#

You can toggle on and off alpha checkerboard display by clicking on (3).

Saving Image#

At anytime you can save the currently displayed image by clicking on (1) (or (2) if you are using the PLE version).

Sampling Quality#

You can control the sampling quality (25) of all layers found in the displayed image. By default, the quality is set to 100% which means original sampling values are used unmodified.

Image rendered with a Sampling Quality set to 100%

Sometimes, it's useful to decrease this value to speed up rendering. In that case original values are used internally as if they were lowered. This value since Clarisse 2.0 also affects anti aliasing sampling. If you set the Image Sampling Quality to 50%, Clarisse will fire 50% of the anti aliasing samples that were set in the renderer.

Renders with Sampling Quality at 0% (left) 25% (center) 50% (right)

This value controls the Sampling Quality attribute that is found in the image. Modifying this field or Sampling Quality attribute using the attribute editor is completely equivalent.

Background/Foreground Plate#

It is possible to set a background and foreground plate image to the Image View. click on (18) or (19) and choose the image you wish to use as background or foreground plate.

Image Buffers and Channels Display#

The Image View can display image buffers (or AOVs) and their individual channels using (19). By default, the Image View is set to rgba and All. This means it will display all Red, Green, Blue channels and use alpha to perform alpha blending over the checkerboard.

You can also display any other channel layers or display individual channels (which will be displayed in gray scale).

Image View displaying rgba.red channel

Image View displaying an AOV

Visual Hint Mode#

Renders can output many different types of AOVs that can be colors, depth information, normals or sampling information used for render diagnostics. This data is always stored as raw values which makes it very difficult when trying to visualize the result.

Indeed, a depth AOV looks as red image with values ranging from 0 to very large world scale values. It is always extremely hard to visualize these AOVs since the only way to understand the AOV is to look at the output values while hovering the mouse cursor over the pixels or playing with the exposure.

Fortunately, Clarisse allows to set visual hint to image buffers so that they are properly displayed by the Image View.

By default the Image View displays automatically the AOV using the visual hint as defined in the Image Buffer Editor. However using the Visual Hint drop down (21), it is possible to override the display mode by switching the visual hint mode from Automatic to the one you wish to use. For more information about visual hints please refer to Visual Hint Mode.

rgba

depth AOV with `Visual Hint set to *Raw

depth AOV with Visual Hint set to Black and White (Normalized)

diagnostics_ray-count AOV with Visual Hint set to Black and White (Normalized)

diagnostics_ray-count AOV with Visual Hint set to Heatmap Normalized