www.kraytracing.com

I am new to Kray and loving it. However I'm not sure the best way to get surface presets to save with a good THUMBNAIL in LW. Due to the physically accurate method of creating surfaces for KR renderer the thumbnails for lightwave are either black or terrible looking no reflection blur etc.

How do other Krayer's out there save their presets? It would be great if you could save a thumbnail image and reference it in the lightwave preset shelf. Or better yet, maybe KR3 could have it's own preset shelf!!!! That could be shared and developed by the community possibly.

Anyone with help on this today with options we have right now to us?

I found this on the Lightwave forums. Look down in the middle of the post there is a program that will allow you to right a new thumbnail to a preset file. It's manual process but then the PST file is saved and always has new thumbnail! Could be very nice in my opinion.

Have not checked it yet, but will. http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php ... les-Format

Sorry in LW or Kray no solution for that. Personally I do not use LW preview surface system. I save all my surfaces as file_name.srf and use my memory.
There some plans in Kray for surfacing system in future.

Janusz Biela wrote:Sorry in LW or Kray no solution for that. Personally I do not use LW preview surface system. I save all my surfaces as file_name.srf and use my memory.
There some plans in Kray for surfacing system in future.

I understand. But for many visual aid's are very nice. Me included. So for us the above program does work. I tested. A bit of work if you must but pretty simple. Only thing is you must refresh/restart lightwave. It doesn't appear that the files are re-read each time the preset shelf is opened.

Works nice though, for anyone interested in having nice preview thumbs for your surfaces rendered with kray!

Save surface
Render out image of your liking (I used the kray depo, surface sampler model)
Run program and place surface file on one side, thumbnail on other side. SAVE
re-open LW and you have nice thumbnails.

Best part is these thumbnails are now part of the srf file so you can trade around! Have fun.

In case the above link goes away for some reason I thought I would post the file here as well. Giving credit to grabiller and Lightwolf from the lightwave forums for such a nice piece of software.