Now for the final menu of Hard Ops is the settings menu. This menu is mainly options for my personal convenience however they might help you as well.
Wire / Solid Toggle
First is the wire / solid mode toggle. This option will cycle between a wireframe model and a solid version. This can be handy when booltooling and reusing them since the operation normally turns them into bounding boxes. There is also an F6 menu to make them real again in case you want to see them in the render. As well as an unrenderable button that will make sure it doesn’t show up in any render.
Here is the function in action along with the F6 menu for making things real again in case I want to render it but really I never use it. That’s really all there is to it. I want to make a few improvements to it and that might come further down the road.
Viewport >> Normal >> Matcap >> Minimal
When it comes to Blender sometimes the viewport can get cluttered with booltools, camaras, lights and basically non mesh items. There have been options for adjusting the view to allow for quick toggling of certain visual looks when working in the 3d view.
Normal – normal viewport. No special changes,
Matcap – sets to the bigred matcap and sets only render, disables relationship lines, and grid floor
Minimal – sets only render, disables relationship lines, and grid floor. Basically just a minimal view so you can work uncluttered.
RenderSets
RenderSets are basically some render preferences I made just to be able to render something nicely and quickly.
Renderset 1 uses path ray tracing with some settings I have become fond of. It used 400 samples which renders fast for most props.
Renderset 2 was created by Derek Barker for a scene of mine recently and they worked so well I put them into renderset2. I normally don’t use branched path tracing but these settings work well and render fast however renderset1 is still my goto.
Framerange
Framerange is basically an option to set the frame range for start and end. It defaults to 100 frames. With the F6 menu you can set the frame range to something more specific.
Material List
Material List will populate with the materials in your scene and therefore allow you quickly assign them without the material panel being required. This option was also added / suggested by Wazou. This option comes in handy. I generally keep a material sphere on the last layer with materials I tend to use therefore my menu is populated. For materials I recommend searching blendswap. Thats where I get mine besides purchasing them, following tutorials and occasional finds. The cool thing about the menu is that you can assign them even to selections in edit mode. This is something I am quite proud of since it makes it the goto panel for materials for me now.
Display N-Gons / Tris
Display N-Gons / Tris: will turn n-gons red and triangles yellow while keeping quads white. This allows for quick identification and easy cleanup if you have to do that. I use this sometimes to find areas however in some cases if you wanted to neutralize just ngons theres also an option below in the menu to select only ngons / tris of a specific object allowing you to deal with it. Hitting Display N-Gons / Tris a 2nd time will turn it off.
That covers the settings menu in it’s current state. I may add more if needed but I am content with its current state but still may add more rendersets and expand on certain functions.
From Imagination To Creation 