User Manual

When a viewer is set to display the view of a camera or light, panning, zooming, or rotating the viewer (seen at
right) actually transforms the camera or light you’re viewing through (seen at left).
It is even possible to view the scene from the perspective of a Merge3D or Transform3D node
by selecting the object from the Camera > Others menu. The same transform techniques will
then move the position of the object. This can be helpful when you are trying to orient an object
in a certain direction.
Transparency Sorting
While generally the order of geometry in a 3D scene is determined by the Z-position of each
object, sorting every face of every object in a large scene can take an enormous amount of
time. To provide the best possible performance, a Fast Sorting mode is used in the OpenGL
renderer and viewers. This is set by right-clicking in the viewer and choosing Transparency >
Z-buffer. While this approach is much faster than a full sort, when objects in the scene are
partially transparent it can also produce incorrect results.
The Sorted (Accurate) mode can be used to perform a more accurate sort at the expense of
performance. This mode is selected from the Transparency menu of the viewer’s contextual
menu. The Renderer3D also presents a Transparency menu when the Renderer Type is set to
OpenGL. Sorted mode does not support shadows in OpenGL. The software renderer always
uses the Sorted (Accurate) method.
Transparency Sorting in the viewer contextual menu.
The basic rule is when a scene contains overlapping transparency, use the Full/Quick Sort
modes, and otherwise use the Z-buffer (Fast). If the Full Sort method is too slow, try switching
back to Z-buffer (Fast).
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