You’re aware of the Only Render checkbox in the Display panel of the 3D View’s Properties region (N), right? If you’re using 3D View OpenGL for rendering, you’ll definitely want this enabled.
Folks, this is sounding a lot more like a support thread than a feature request thread. The only feature requested so far that isn’t actually already supported appears to be better alpha handling when using Textured viewport shading. As such, I’ve moved the thread from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Compositing and Post Processing” (since it originally referred to using the VSE)
that would be great if it didn’t affect my viewport as well. i wonder why the opengl render settings were bound to the viewport settings in the first place. in its current state, it’s just a snapshot tool and snapping is something that every os can do, so…
It was included there because it was already being drawn there. And the purpose for OpenGL rendering is primarily for previewing… often it’s valuable to show base structure in previews. You could always split off a separate Blender window that has Only Render enabled and use that exclusively for generating the OpenGL renders.
And it is more than a screenshot tool… particularly when producing animations or if you need an alpha channel. Yes, you can take a single screenshot with your OS. But an animated sequence with an alpha channel with specific actions/poses at specific frames at the correct resolution (regardless of screen size)? No OS screenshot tool that I’m aware of can do that.
Of course, if you want to experiment, you could do playback in the 3D Viewport and try to do a realtime screencast of that.
The 3D Viewport is rendering (it’s a real time renderer). It just isn’t writing those renders to disk.
But maybe I’m not understanding what you want. Please be specific in what you’re asking for (pictures help) and how it differs from existing features… and please, try the existing features.
I agree that this is more a problem of user suppport/education, not Blender features.
There is “OpenGL Render”, found in the “Render” dropdown in the info panel. It supports anti-aliasing and uses “textured” mode. It doesn’t render any UI-elements. It is a “proper” render mode in that you can also use it for animations.
Separate from that, there’s the “OpenGL render active viewport” button, which uses whatever viewport settings you have.
Khalibloo, what I said about raytracing vs. rasterization was general, however at the time I did believe it applied to Blender Internal. That’s not the case, BI always uses rasterization for primary visibility. At least that’s my conclusion from rendering 500 million faces worth of instanced monkeys (no difference for turning on raytracing). Consequently, this scene renders twice as fast in Cycles even with full pathtracing at 512 samples. So if you have a complex scene, try going for Cycles directly instead. Anyway, your use-case is completely different from the topic of this thread. If you’re just rendering image planes, none of this matters.
thanks for clearing that up. but knowing the powers of opengl, it’s easy to get frustrated over the limitations of our opengl renderer.
anyways, i’ve been working slowly on an opengl renderer. with any luck, it should fulfill most of my simple needs.