Post-processing and render tools (Patreon)

External render tool

I've added an external render tool which can be used as an alternative to rendering in Pragma. Here's how it works:

1) You load your session in PFM like usual

2) You set up the scene for rendering and create a "render job" by pressing a button

3) Instead of rendering, PFM generates a scene snapshot, which requires everything needed to render the frame (except for the assets).

That snapshot can then be used with the external tool to perform the actual rendering. This is primarily useful for long sequences or animations, which can take quite a while to render. The tool has several advantages over rendering in Pragma directly:

• You don't have to keep Pragma running in the background during the render process

• You can keep working on projects without affecting the rendering in any way

• It's much faster than rendering directly in Pragma (since more GPU resources are available if Pragma is not running)

• Less prone to crashing

• Doesn't require Vulkan and runs on pretty much anything

• You can use both your CPU and GPU simultaneously when rendering animations

• You can cancel it any time, frames that have already been rendered will not be lost (except for the current one) 

This has already saved me quite a bit of time and I hope it'll save time for others as well 😄!

Post-processing with Pragma

Since Cycles only outputs gamma-corrected images by default, I decided to implement some post-processing capabilities directly into Pragma. Images rendered with Cycles are now saved in the original HDR color space, which opens up a lot more options for post-processing, and the Pragma interface now has post-processing options for depth-of-field, new tone-mapping options, vignettes and changing the intensity of particles (as shown in the video). These are all applied in real-time, so you can immediately see the result and don't have to re-render everything. The post-processing options are currently in the same window as the Cycles render options, but I'll probably create a separate post-processing window in the future to keep it more organized. 

Alternatively you can also enable DOF with Cycles, which is more accurate, but requires you to re-render the entire frame whenever changes to the DOF settings are made (and it also doesn't work with particles).

I wasn't going to implement features until later in development, but they came in very handy for rendering the Meet-the-Soldier short, so I squeezed them in a little early.

I'm currently focusing on getting the OpenGL renderer finished, since that's almost complete anyway and should solve quite a few issues with some hardware setups, after that it's back to working on the editing features!