• Introduction
• Interface
• Bodypaint 3
• Animation Controls
• Timeline
• Enhanced OpenGL
• Interactive Render Region (IRR)
• Character Animation / Mocca 3
• Layers / Layer Manager
• Object Manager
• Documentation
• Tutorials & Goodies
• Miscellaneous
• Conclusion

Enhanced OpenGL

Release 10 now has Enhanced OpenGL options, that are available to modern graphics cards. This means that your OpenGL displays in the viewport can be a lot more realistic and this means less test renders.

The MAXON web site says "Based on Pixel Shader technology you can now display transparencies, environment maps, real-time shadows and more. In addition, highlights, specularity and lighting in general appear more accurately in your editor view. That means, less test renders and more accurate results"

Generally any card that is less than 2 years old will probably support Enhanced OpenGL. My old AGP nVidia fx5700 card said in the new preferences section that it supported Enhanced OpenGL. I found that it didn't support it correctly as the card is only OpenGL 1.5 compliant. Anyway a new Intel Core Duo system with a nVidia 7900GS card later and I'm up and flying with Enhanced OpenGL. The MAXON blurb describes the capabilities pretty well so we'll look at what you get. First up the new section and the expanded OpenGL section in the preferences.

You can see in the bottom image that my card meets the requirements. The first image shows the new preference options and there's several options that you can alter. The first one is just enabling Enhanced OpenGL. This won't actually make your scene display in Enhanced OpenGL. You have to do that in each view by enabling a few settings. We'll get to that soon.

Maximum transparency depth - This setting defines the maximum number of transparent polygons that can be displayed behind each other. Higher values will lead to slower display times. Be careful enabling this in the viewport as it can slow things down a lot. I would suggest leaving the depth at the default 2. You can also have anti-aliasing if you use a value of 0.

Maximum light sources / Maximum Shadows - Maximum light sources defines the maximum number of light sources Enhanced OpenGL will calculate (in the order in which they appear in the Object Manager). Higher values will lead to slower display times and the maximum is 20. The default setting is 8. You can see I've increased this to 12 but that doesn't mean if you have 12 omni lights all with shadows enabled that you will get 12 shadows. I gather omni lights are treated like 6 spotlights and with a maximum of 10 shadows permitted with 3 omni lights you'll only get 2 lots of shadows. To get 3 lots of shadows you would need to change your omnis to spot lights. (You will however get the scene lit with the 3 omni lights) With spotlights the maximum number of shadows is 6 and I've tested this myself in the 2 images below. Identical set up except the image on the right uses 6 spotlights instead of 6 omni lights. Increasing the spotlights up to the maximum light sources just brightens the scene but you're still restricted to 6 shadows. To get up to 10 shadows you have to have a mixture of lights sources and they have to be in the right order in the Object Manager as Enhanced OpenGL (as well as regular Gourard shading) lights the scene using the lights as it finds them in the Object Manager up to the maximums.

Compiler - You have an option here to change the compiler. The GLSL one is faster and can be affected by graphics card driver updates. The CG one is slower, more stable and isn't affected by graphics card driver updates. I couldn't notice any difference using either so I'm sticking with the CG compiler.

To use Enhanced OpenGL you need to first change your display mode to Gouraud shading or Gouraud shading with lines. It won't work in other display modes. You then enable Enhanced OpenGL from the viewport display menu along with the various options that you want like in the image below.

Okay, so what do scenes look like. Usually they do look better. Shadows are only displayed as hard shadows even if you have soft or area shadows enabled. The Post Effects option seems fairly limited and all I could figure out was that the Cel Render Quantize shading is displayed. Sometimes the shadows can look very blocky and good example that you can test yourself is look at the built in Chess game with Enhanced OpenGL and shadows enabled. Here's a Pool table scene with 3 display modes: Gouraud Shading, Enhanced OpenGL Shading and a full render. Interesting that with a different view (not shown) and lights I get the very blocky looking shadows like in the Chess game.

As you can see the Enhanced OpenGL display is a lot better with the shadows and more accurate lighting. The Pool balls all have a HDR image loaded into the environment channel to simulate reflection of a room and this is visible. The bump on the table felt is visible as well. Note the artifacts and this is quite common. You're able to render animation previews in Enhanced OpenGL mode and these render very fast and are a great way to test your animations.

Enhanced OpenGL doesn't work with BodyPaint in painting mode. Interesting as I found the display mode that BodyPaint uses when painting actually gives a more accurate representation of the paint than with the same materials in C4D mode running under Enhanced OpenGL.

Further to the options discussed above, the Material Editor has additional options on the Illumination tab to disable specific channels whilst in Enhanced OpenGL mode. These settings have no effect when Enhanced OpenGL is disabled and also don't have any affect when rendering. Useful if a complex channel is bogging things down. Here's an example below with identical materials. The material for the cube on the left has its Bump channel disabled.

All in all I was pretty happy with Enhanced OpenGL. On moderate to complex scenes there can be delay while the view changes but usually after it has updated the response times are quite good. However you do need a fairly grunty computer to be able to use it properly. One thing that I did find that made it work better was after going into Enhanced OpenGL mode, just zooming in or out slightly then made subsequent view changes fast and remain in Enhanced OpenGL mode with out dropping back to standard Gouraud shading mode.