Overview of Presenter

Overview of Presenter

The Presenter plugin enables you to set up materials and lights in your scene and render it with more realism and effects. Like all plugins, Presenter is a dockable tabbed control bar accessed through the Tools menu (Hint: hold down the Control key to prevent the control bar from docking if necessary). From the Presenter control bar you can edit pre-defined materials and apply them to items in the scene, add lights to the scene and set up rules for applying the materials to other files in the same project set up with the same parameters. You can define and apply your materials and lights to a model and save the settings into a JetStream .nwf file so that as the model is updated, the materials and lights remain the same. Materials can also be brought through from CAD applications via the .3DS, .dwg and .dgn file formats, or by exporting from 3D Studio Viz or Max (see the chapter called "Converting Files" in the Roamer book for more details on this).

While Presenter can be used for photorealistic renderings, it can also be used for OpenGL interactive rendering and once you've set up the scene with Presenter, you can view the materials and lights in Roamer. There are special rendering styles to interactively preview the Presenter materials and lights called Full Lights and Full Render on the Rendering Style toolbar:

The Materials Lighting Effects and Rendering tabs are divided into two panes. The left hand pane contains the archives and the right hand pane contains the scene's palette, which defines what materials, lighting, effects and render styles are used in the scene. Archives are shown in a tree structure and are defined in the LightWorks Archive (.lwa) format.

There are three pre-defined archives that are installed with Presenter:

• The Recommended archives contain materials, lighting, effects and rendering styles that are recommended for most users. These include materials, lights and effects that can be seen during interactive navigation in JetStream Roamer and can be fully rendered with OpenGL. Of course, they will look better when rendered photorealistically.

• Additional materials, light studios, effects and render styles are available in the Standard archive. These include materials that cannot be fully reproduced using OpenGL and therefore will not be seen properly in interactive mode, or until a full photorealistic render is done.

• Any materials, lights, effects and render styles from any archive can be used as a template starter for your own definitions, but the Templates archive contains instances of each type of material, light, effect and render style, giving you quicker access.

Additional .lwa archives can be downloaded from http:\'\'www.lightworks-user.com. Although materials, lights, effects and render styles cannot be edited in archives, once dragged into the scene's palette, they can be edited and saved with the scene in a JetStream .nwf file, or published as a JetStream .nwd file (if you have a valid JetStream Publisher license).

You can save your own edits to materials into an .nwp file - see for more information on how to do this. Also, there is a User archive, which allow you to save your own edited materials, lights, effects and render styles, for use in other scenes.