Other than the viewport, it might be more useful if instead of this:
…the user could build their own rendering modes, such as Draft and Final, where they pick which resolution, rendering passes, and quality they/we want.
They layout is…interesting. When I use this menu, I change my settings above–then I jump down below for the rest of them. In usage, the related settings are split, with quite a few things between things that affect rendering quality and time, with some static things that I already set elsewhere–in between them.
The menu springs an idea on us, about “Production Quality Render,” which we aren’t really formally introduced to. It doesn’t state above that those settings are “Production Quality Render.”
[I’d better RTFM, or perhaps ask a few people, like the evening when I asked people what “Object Oriented” means to people who program in Java, Python, and C++ : ) ]
I think I get that you didn’t want people to get in trouble, but my gut tells me that they are going to alternate between two things: make a draft, make a final (perhaps some people are going to want something in between?) I doubt they are going to change things like the ground plane, or the background, or lighting, etc in that menu, but they are going to change things that affect quality and time.
I’d still like to see a [Draft] and [Final] toggle, with settings for each. Perhaps a [Load Defaults] button could be there, just in case things get out of hand. For extra credit, a denoise option checkbox on each would seem prudent.
[For instance nVidia’s Denoise works well to remove the noise–but then all comes down to resolution and acquiring detail. I did some experiments with it with perhaps 100 passes perhaps less, which yielded: a confused smeary mess. Still, it does work if it has something to bite into.]
Some scenes require more passes than others. I would be concerned that some people might think that Rhino Render might not be capable of quality renderings at 1500 passes. The menu kind of suggests 1500 is all it has to give.
[Without Denoise, I find that the point of diminishing returns line is about 12,000-15,000. Here’s a snip still showing a bit of noise even at 20,000 passes.
Because this is a dark, evening image, the noise shows more than something brightly lit. I don’t notice much dark noise on light surfaces. Obviously, nVidia Denoise was written to help pathtracing. It might further be enhanced to preserve more detail on lighter objects by being less agressive–while still be aggressive toward light noise on dark objects. It’s kind like using “Darken only” in PhotoShop.
In the image, noise is not apparent on the grey horizontal things (they are windows blinds in the full image), but light noise is still visible in the dimmer areas.]