Interactive rendering viewports restarting after uncorrelated actions

[actrask]

Not sure if this is more bug fix or feature request, but can you make it so the interactive rendering windows don't have to restart after something like setting 'show material in viewport' from the material editor?

There are a few other instances where this happens. I don't have another specific example off-hand, but they don't seem to have anything to do with affecting what the renderer is doing.

Small thing but it would make the work experience a bit nicer if the IR didn't have to reset so much.

Edit: I just found another one so I'm going to start a list by editing this comment as I find them. By all means tell me if there is absolutely no way to fix it even though the action seems unrelated to the renderer.

-opening the slate material editor
-entering and exiting sub-object mode
-changing an objects wireframe color
-putting an object into another layer in the scene explorer (not moving it in 3d space)
-changing the pivot point of an object
-hiding or unhiding objects when "render hidden geometry" is checked in the common render dialog
-after the scene completes an autosave
-changing the Gizmo size of a light
-when hitting "show material in viewport"
-adding or deleting light sources from the Light Select Render Element

[Ryuu]

Thanks for making the list, we'll sure appreciate any more examples you encounter.

I didn't look at the specific examples you mentioned yet, but generally some of these restarts are impossible to avoid, because in some situations all we get from 3ds Max is some notification like "hey, something about this material/object has changed" and we have no way of knowing what that is, so we play it safe and restart the IR. We could manually check if the state of the material/map/object changed in any significant way, but that would add additional processing to IR restarts (slowing them down) and there will plenty of opportunity for new bugs - instead of restarting when not needed, we might end up not restarting when needed in many cases until all the bugs are fixed (and they never are). So for now, we're just playing it safe and restarting whenever we know something has changed and we cannot reliably check that it was not something important.

Well, that was the general case. We'll definitely look into the examples you provided.

And one more example - IR is being restarted when you're navigating the material hierarchy in slate material editor. We'll try to fix this in the next release.

[actrask]

Awesome, yes what you describe is what I assumed. Makes sense to err on the side of accurately displaying what's going on.

So ironically that brings me to another IR thing I found; editing the values in CoronaAO doesn't update correctly in IR. It will make a slight change, but after you stop and restart IR, you can see the real results and it's a *huge* difference.

Thanks for staying on top of this stuff, Corona is a great product!