I’m a digital artist who’s fluent in lots of different software but I’m only a lightweight Blender user for a few years now.
At this moment I mostly use it to aid my 2D conceptual work.
For this I often have rough renders which I quickly continue working on in Photoshop.
Below I’ll play a bit dumb and give my feedback on both UI and behaviour - things I’m expecting, missing or don’t understand as Mr. Average:
Render window doesn’t have a save button. Just this:
Image List in my blend file: cool
Name: cool
Fake User Pin: I don’t care, I’m an average user, what is this?
(btw icon is greyed out but I can still use it)
New Image: I just made a render, let me deal with my render please
Open Image: same^^
X: Wow, if I hit this I won’t see my render! But thankfully it’s not deleted, pheww.
Save button: … ah sorry, there’s none. : (
Then sure I have this menu:
First thing I see: Save is greyed out! OMG why? … Let’s calm down. Let the gears rotate in my head: is it impossible to save my image or it’s automatically saved somewhere with some name? Hmm, it’s not in C:\tmp\ because only image sequences end up there. Is it in Data option’s Temporary Files folder? Maybe. I couldn’t (but don’t even want to) find it there
I only know I can’t hit that button. I can “Save As” though. Me and my image are safe now.
Alt+S and Shift+S are weird choices but fine… But when is “Save” accessible at all? (honest question, this is not just a feedback thread)
I just noticed the “Edit Externally” button. Is this a not-yet-finished option where I can assign PS to and with a click my render will open up in there? That would be great, but I can’t find a place in Prefs where I can set it up. I do use something like this in FastStone image viewer and I love it:
Why do we have these options in the render window?
I can access the paint tools but they don’t do anything on my image (I wouldn’t even want them to - I just gave it a try)
I know - I know - versatility… but the same is true for the editor list drop down.
Would it be possible to Copy (with alpha) anything I have in the render view with Ctrl+C ?
Then I wouldn’t even have to save out my roughs
Blender’s rendered images never show up in Windows’ Quick Access / Recent file list
Blend files do, but renders don’t. Am I right if I consider this a bug?
Just a question out of Mr. Average’s scope: shouldn’t annotations show up in my image if I “Save as” after using it?
You are used to applications that have a window dedicated to Render Result.
That is not the case in Blender.
Render Result is displayed in a common Image Editor.
That is the reason of presence of Image menu and View/Paint/Mask modes.
When render result is saved as an image, user has to re-open this image as an image datablock to be able to edit/paint it.
At that moment, save item is available to overwrite this Image datablock.
Edit Externally also refers to an already saved Image datablock.
In User Preferences, you have to precise PS path under File Paths Tab, Applications panel, Image Editor.
I don’t think that render should be automatically saved because, we can make a lot of test renders.
But at the moment, user saves a render. Image Editor should automatically display this image instead of render result datablock.
IMHO that could be Windows’ fault too. x) I barely use that on my computers because there’s always a lot of things missing for me.
IMHO it should be possible through the “Save As Image” options, like this:
No it doesn’t save only videos, it saves whatever format you want.
The issue is that by default, single frame renders are not saved into files. There are addons to add this functionality into Blender, but as usual with addons when disabled or not even shipped in Blender by default: Mr. Average don’t know about them. That’s the issue.
I’m against that. Because Mr. Average usually aren’t aware embedded files in .blend even exists, it’s already somewhat advanced. Also, it doesn’t really make sense as soon as you work with incremental saves: you would store duplicated data for nothing.
Same issues. And it would make the .blend files incredibly heavy and slow to manage/open/save, while still being out of the range of average users, and this time just to keep files in memory even though you don’t need that.
The best option is to save the renders on the disk. But it should be made accessible out of the box, right in the output options.
Actually, is there any reason why autosaving single frames renders on disk havn’t been implemented yet?
Maybe @brecht knows?
If it has been decided to not do it for some technical or “blender paradigm” reason, then I guess it can only come from a community made addon. But if it is just yet another feature waiting at the bottom of the to-do list, then maybe it can be handled by some new devs willing to do simple things. I guess.
