• To make every child object's name visible in the Sequencer, hold down the
OPTION key while clicking on a "closed" drop arrow. To hide every child's name,
press OPTION while clicking on an "open" arrow.
• When dragging the world time marker, punch in or punch out marker, or an
eventmark to make the Sequencer window scroll, it will scroll faster as you move the mouse farther from edge of the window.
• If you click anywhere on the horizontal "bar" beneath the World Time Ruler, the
marker will move to where you clicked. This can be especially helpful when
you want to move far forward or backward in time, since you don't have to drag
the marker to the desired location. The Punch In and Punch Out markers work
the same way if you click to the left of the Punch In marker or to the right of the
Punch Out marker.
• Double-clicking on an object's name in the Sequencer selects all of that object's
Eventmarks.
• Operations in the Sequencer window happen more quickly if it's on a monitor
displaying a small number of colors. The Sequencer is more responsive on a
monitor set to 256 colors (or grays) than on one set to millions of colors, and it
fastest on a monitor set to display in black & white. If you have more than
one monitor (lucky you!), try setting one of them to black & white and moving the
Sequencer window there. Be sure that the whole Sequencer window appears on
one monitor for maximum speedup.
• Another factor that affects the amount of work the Sequencer window has to do
is the number of object names (and timelines) being displayed. The more names
there are to display, the longer it will take to update the Sequencer. You can
cut down on the number of names that need to be displayed by hiding any linked
objects you aren't working on and keeping the height of the Sequencer window
reasonable.
• Holding down the CONTROL key while dragging an Eventmark, the world time
marker, or the punch in or punch out marker makes the item you are dragging
"snap" to the divisions on the Sequencer's time ruler (at the default magnification,
this translates to quarters of a second). Although this feature existed in earlier versions of Infini-D, it is particularly useful in the new Sequencer since there are now more divisions to snap to.
• Holding the SHIFT key while dragging one of these controls forces it to snap to
the time of the closest visible Eventmark.
SPEEDING UP YOUR RENDERING
Phong ("Best") shading and ray tracing are very time consuming processes. There
are, however, ways that you can cut down on your rendering time:
• Reflection & Refraction : Refraction takes more computational time than
reflection. The reason for this is that in reflection, a "ray" bounces off of the
object (one hit) while in refraction, the ray must pass through the object (two hits.)
Note that an object that is 100% refractive will take the same amount of time to render as one that is only 1% refractive—only the color of the object will be affected.
• Marbles, Woods & Noise : Of the three, marbles take the longest time to
generate, woods the second longest and noises are the fastest. There are certain
effects you can only get with marbles and woods, but there are many effects that
noises are fine for. (And, keeping the above paragraph in mind, transparent
marble is a killer!)
• Pick your rendering modes wisely: Phong ("Best") shading will give you all of an
object’s texture, without as much computation time as ray tracing. When working with animated text with simple surfaces, Gouraud ("Better") shading, possibly in conjunction with an environment map, can give very good, quick results. If your scene contains many objects, only a few of which actually move, consider rendering the static objects separately to a PICT file, then rendering just the moving objects against that PICT, using version 2.5's new Background Image feature.
• Use anti-aliasing only for final output. Anti-aliasing produces extremely high quality images, but it takes a great deal of time to calculate. Set up your scene and do your test renderings with no anti-aliasing. Turn anti-aliasing on before doing your final rendering.
Thank you for your support. We hope you enjoy Infini-D.
