The frame panel

What it is#

Double-clicking a .vxcompositor opens the frame panel. A document whose game: is a !StandardFrame opens as its eight semantic knobs and its look profile, both as ordinary inspector forms; a hand-authored document opens read-only. Under the forms are four readouts:

* What it expands to — the stages, targets and buffers the node becomes, rebuilt on every edit, with the expansion's own guardrail refusals shown where they happen. * Resolved quality — every knob of the quality table, its value, and which of the three layers decided it: the engine's own defaults, the project's RenderQuality.vxpreset, or the document's inline preset:. * Volumes reaching the camera — the fold PostProcessVolumeSystem performs, per camera: *N* of *M* volumes contributing, and per parameter the value, the weight it won at, and the layer that had the last word. * Explode to a full document — doc 39's escape hatch, as a button.

StandardFrameEditorFactory claims the extension; StandardFrameDocument is the model and StandardFrameView the panel over it.

What it is for#

The frame document is the one file every project ships and, until this panel, the one file nothing opened. More importantly, every number it decides comes out of a fold: the quality waterfall folds per parameter across three files, and the volume stack folds across four layers. A panel that showed only the final number would answer "what is it" while the question anybody actually arrives with is "why is it *that*" — and would send them to edit the wrong file. So both tables show provenance beside the value, and the ones that came from somewhere other than the engine's own table are the ones that are coloured.

Using it#

The knobs are live. Every row writes through to the node and re-runs the expansion, so turning shadows from Cascades to Off takes the caster stage and its atlases out of the counts under the form as you watch — no save, no restart. Nothing is written to disk until you save; what is live is the expansion the panel is showing you.

The look profile is optional per parameter. Each row is a tick and a value: ticked is an opinion, unticked says nothing and lets whatever is under it stand. That distinction is the whole of doc 32's overlay model, and a look that sets fogDensity: 0 has cleared the fog where one that says nothing about fog has not.

"Only what is overridden" cuts the resolved table from sixty-odd rows to the handful your own files have claimed. A row is *overridden* when a layer above the engine states it — not when it changes it, because a preset that pins the engine's own number has still taken ownership of it and is still where you would go to change it.

The volume stack folds from the focused viewport's camera, published as IActiveView. Flying into a volume and watching the count move is the check to make when a volume "is not working": the gap between *N* and *M* is a volume that is placed and not reaching, which looks exactly like one that is not wired up at all.

Explode is one-way and says so. It replaces the node with the graph it stood for — comments included — writes the authored file beside it as <name>.vxcompositor.authored, and re-reads the document. The panel then says the file is hand-authored, hides the knobs and stops writing it, because a form left showing knobs over a file that no longer has them is a form whose every write is discarded.

Examples#

Reading the resolved quality table outside the panel — a build report, a test, a settings screen:

Folding a scene's volumes for one camera position:

See also#

* The Standard Frame — the node the knobs are members of * Render quality presets — the waterfall the table is a view of * Post-process volumes — the fold the stack panel reads * Inspectors in markup — how the two forms are written * The editing pipeline — what a row is, underneath