Display Options
The display options control the look, performance and display of
images. To open the display options dialog, press 'd' (default hotkey).
When done setting the options, select 'Apply' (to apply and keep the
window open) or 'Accept' (to apply and close the window). If
"Save as Default" is selected, the display options are saved in
$HOME/houdini[Version]/mplay.prefs for future sessions.
Display Page
Integer
Image Scaling Only
If enabled, zooming will scale or
shrink the images only by integer amounts (2, 3, 4, 1/2, 1/3, etc).
Auto
Mipmap Images
If enabled, mipmaps are generated on
demand when the image is zoomed
out beyond 3x. This may produce a slight delay during scaling as the
mipmap is generated.
Pop
window when rendering Images
When rendering images, this option will
pop mPlay to the front of the window stack whenever a render is started.
Fast Pixel Aspect Ratio Display
For pixel aspect ratios other than 1:1, this enables a fast, hardware
horizontal scale to produce an image that appears to be at the correct
aspect ratio. However, this can produce scaling artifacts. If off, a
slower, software horizontal scale is used that eliminates these
artifacts.
Video Card Options...
This pops up a dialog for troubleshooting video card problems. There
are 3 high level controls, which will set the individual options:
- Best Hardware Usage -
Don't use software emulation for any feature.
- Common Features Only -
Use hardware features that most video cards support.
- Best Compatibility - Use
full software emulation. This will normally slow done display quite a
bit, but all features should work.
Use
Color Dithering
Dithers the images to approximate the
image's full colour depth (when
the display is not capable of showing the image's full colour depth).
Dithering places adjacent pixels close to the actual colour next to
each other in order to make it appear like the real colour - from a
distance, the resulting "speckled" pattern appears to resemble the
actual colour. Dithering also helps break-up moiré patterns if
they
exist.
Display Images at 8bit Pixel Depth
If enabled, all images are compressed to an 8 bit pixel depth.
Otherwise they are passed to OpenGL in their native format (floating
point, 16 bit or 32bit).
Use Hardware Accelerated Colour
Functions
If your graphics card supports OpenGL hardware acceleration, enabling
this option will use that capability to speed-up colour calculations.
OpenGL colour functions affect the gamma, brightness, contrast and
other functions.
Only disable this if your video card does not implement these functions
properly, in which case, images will either not appear or the colour
functions will have no effect.
Use Hardware Accelerated Lookup Tables
Attempts to use hardware OpenGL features when the Gamma is set to a
value other than 1, or a lookup table is applied to the image (using
the -l command line option (mplay) or the Viewport Display LUT in the
Display Options). If playback is much slower, or the LUT has no effect,
turn this option off.
Use Luminance Images for Single Frames
Uses a single monochrome 8 bit image to display 1 channel images such
as Alpha, Masks and Z-Depth. Turn this option off if these types of
images do not display, or if display of these images is substantially
slower than normal colour images. These images will be promoted
to
greyscale RGB for better performance (but consuming three times the
memory).
RGB Component Display Mode
Sets the Component Selection Hardware mode viewing R, G, and B,
individually. Hardware greyscale shows R, G and B as greyscale images.
Hardware RGB shows R as red, G as green, and B as blue. Software
greyscale shows R, G and B as greyscale, but does the conversion in
software (some video cards cannot do this efficiently in hardware -
long delays in panning or noticable colour flickering are symptoms).
Viewport Page
This page has options for viewport layout and display.
Multiple
Node Display
Specify a Split View or a Single View to be used for displaying
multiple nodes.
Layout Horizontally First, then
Vertically
If enabled, images are added to Viewports with a horizontal preference.
If disabled, Viewports are added verically first. This only applies
when more than one row and column are used in the viewport layout (ie
2x2, 4x2, 3x3).
Show All Viewports Always
If enabled, all the viewports specified by the layout will be visible,
even if whole rows or columns of viewports are empty. If off, the
viewer dynamically adapts the number of viewports up to the layout
specified.
Default Viewport Layout
Specifies the default startup layout of the viewports, from 1x1 to 4x4.
Display Viewport Information
Specifies the amount of information present in the viewport information
labels, from Minimal (name only) to Verbose (all image information
displayed).
Image Guide
The name of an image guide file. The guide file is a text file with a
series of drawing commands which will overlay a guide on the image. All
coordinates are expressed in pixels.
Image
Guide Commands
box X Y Width Height
|
Draws a box at (X,Y) with the specified width and
height. |
rect X1 Y1 X2 Y2
|
Draws a box with one corner at (X1, Y1) and the
opposite corner at (X2, Y2). |
line X1 Y1 X2 Y2
|
Draws a line from (X1, Y1) to (X2, Y2). |
lines Num dX dY X1 Y1 X2 Y2
|
Draws a series of lines from (X1, Y1) to
(X2, Y2), offseting both coordinate pairs by (dX, dY) each time. Num
lines are drawn. |
color R G B A
|
Sets the drawing colour to {R,G,B,A}. |
Background Colour
Specifies the background colour of the image viewer, normally black.
Click the colour preview to display a
colour picker dialog.
Background Page
Background images will always be stretched to fit the size of the
currently displayed image. If the aspect ratio of the background image
and the current image do not match, you will get distortion of the
background image.
Note: Background images are
only visible when Transparency is enabled.
Filename
The name of the background image to use. If none is specified, then no
background image will be displayed.
Use Res
Manually specify a resolution to use for the background image instead
of using the natural size of the image.
Foreground Images are Premultiplied
Most rendered images are premultiplied, which means that the colour has
already been multipled by the alpha plane. However, if just place an
arbitrary alpha plane without running it
through a Premultiply COP, then the resulting image is not
premultiplied, and your transparency will be wrong.
For example: Place a File COP, append a Shape COP and have it replace
the Alpha plane with a star shape, then enable transparency.
You'll
need to turn off "Foreground Images are Premultiplied" in order to see
the proper image.
Correction Page
This page contains options for color correction of the displayed images.
Display
LUT
Applies a LUT file to the display images.
Inspect LUT
When inspecting, the raw values of the image will be run backwards
through the LUT file to produce the original values (i.e. Cineon
values).
Default Display Gamma
The default gamma applied to all images, which can be interactively
changed using the color correction controls.
Gamma Correct Planes
The names of planes to gamma correct. Normally, this is just the colour
plane (C).
Handles Page
This page contains options for the display of handles and guides.
Render
with Smooth Lines
If enabled, the handle and guide lines will be anti-aliased.
Render with Alpha Blending
If enabled, the handle and guide lines will be slightly transparent.
Handle Colour
The basic colour of all handles and guides. The default is bright grey.
Specify an rgb for the handle colour, or click the colour preview to
display a color picker.
Handle Pick Size
The size of the handle's pick region (in pixels). Larger values make
the handles easier to pick, however, values above 10 should be used
with caution, since handles may be unintentionally picked with such a
forgiving value. This option does not have an effect in mplay.
2.6 Memory Page
This page contains options for memory usage.
Limit
Viewer Memory Usage
If enabled, the image cache has a maximum size specified by the Image
Cache Size.
Image Cache Size
The size of the image cache, in Mb.
Image Compression
If memory is short, you may want to apply lossless compression to
images. This enables lossless compression on the cached images, with
varying degrees of compression/CPU usage.
Clear Images from Memory
Flushes the image cache, freeing all image memory, exception that used
by the currently displayed image(s).