User guide

Viz Engine Administrator’s Guide

• Frame Counter: This setting takes effect for Standard-PC versions that use NVIDIA

cards and drivers.

• Incremental: Increases the field counter with every field

• OpenGL: Tries to requests the retrace counter thru OpenGL. If not possible, due

to driver or hardware problems, it falls back to the Incremental mode.

• System: Uses the internal CPU clock.

• Frame Speed: Enables Viz to run at a slower rate than the actual refresh rate

(determined by the screen speed with the use of a g-sync card). This is relevant

for video wall applications when the scene (e.g. interactive scenes) cannot run

real time (resource intensive), hence, all participating computers are synched to a

lower speed. Running at 30Hz (screen speed 60Hz divided by 2) can be acceptable,

however, this will affect the animation quality (animation will not be as smooth).

Combined Images

• Image Combining: In a texture editor (see Viz Artist) it is possible to set a second

texture which will be used for the image combining. The texture editor offers

two possible modes: The first mode uses the second image as an alpha channel,

whereas the second mode defines a blend between the two textures. Configuring

Image Combining to Software enables the combination to be calculated entirely on

the CPU. Configuring Image Combining to Multi Texturing enables the combination

to be calculated on the graphics card for combining or blending the two images. In

this case the texture creation is faster and memory will be saved as well. Default

is Software. If there are performance or memory issues, especially with scenes

imported from Viz 2.x, it is recommended to change this setting to Multi Texturing.

• Key Render Mode: This configuration is used when the Key Render Mode under

Scene Settings in Viz Artist is set to Config, and determines how the key should be

rendered:

• Double Pass: Uses two rendering steps as in older 3.x versions. Double Pass

should be used for old 3.x scenes for not breaking compatibility, for new scenes

Single Pass should be used as it is faster.

• Single Pass: Uses one rendering step as in 2.8 versions.

Shaped video versus unshaped video

A shaped video image has its video data multiplied by its alpha component while the

video data of an unshaped image remains untouched. Shaped images are also referred

to as pre-multiplied alpha images.