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QV 4A Windows Layout render display, requires LightWave 6.0 or later.
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| Introduction QV is an agile, responsive alternative to the Image Viewer that ships with LightWave.
The first version of QV was a free plug-in released in the summer of 1996, shortly after LightWave 5.0. The following spring, the second version was bundled with LightWave, and about a year and a half after that, I released the third version as a modestly priced commercial product. QV 4 is the first update in seven years, and the first written after the significant improvements to LightWave's plug-in programming interface introduced in LightWave 6.0. If you've used previous versions of QV, the most important changes in QV 4 are floating-point pixels and improved image saver access. This version supports drag-scrolling, and it remembers the render time and some other scene settings for each image. It also addresses, although it doesn't entirely solve, a problem created by changes in Microsoft Windows that affect the ability of plug-ins like QV to bring their windows to the foreground. People tend to assume that "QV" is short for Quick Viewer or somesuch, but it's actually a nod to coworkers from my youth, when I worked in an insurance company clerical department called Quality Verification. Install QV as you would any other plug-in, after which you'll find it in the Render Display list on the Render Options panel. At the end of an F9 render in LightWave, QV opens a window to display your rendered image. QV stores two versions of the image. One is the original floating-point image as it was received from LightWave. The other is a 32-bit version created for QV's display. QV automatically dismisses LightWave's Render Status dialog box. The information shown there (the render time and a settings summary) is duplicated in QV and can be found on the Notes tab of the Notes and Settings dialog (keyboard shortcut n). QV can hold up to ten images at a time. If all ten image slots are full, the next image to arrive replaces the oldest image. If you close QV's window (using the Esc key or the close box in the window's title bar), QV discards all of its stored images. If you minimize the window, QV retains all of its images. QV minimizes onto the Windows taskbar to keep it out of the way of Layout's interface and to make it easy to find later. When a new image is rendered, QV automatically reopens its window, or restores it if it's been minimized. You can switch between images using the radio buttons along the bottom of the window, or by hitting a number key (the first image is 1 and the tenth is 0). Mouse clicks change the image zoom. The left mouse button zooms in, centering the image on the pixel you click on. The right button zooms out. You can also zoom from the keyboard using the comma ( , ) and period ( . ) keys, which on U.S. keyboards are the unshifted left and right angle brackets ( < and > ). These are the same as the default keys in Layout for zooming the view. The current zoom level is displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the QV window. If the image is larger than the QV window, you can pan or scroll it. Scrollbars will appear on the right and bottom edges of the image. You can also drag the image with the mouse by holding down the Ctrl key and the left mouse button and moving the mouse. On the keyboard, the cursor keys move the image four pixels at a time (or 64 if you hold down the Shift key). Home and End move to the left and right edge, and Page Up and Page Down move to the top and bottom edge. The status bar displays the name of the image, the zoom level, the pixel coordinates at the mouse cursor's current position, and the color of that pixel. The pixel color can be displayed as byte (0 to 255) or floating-point (0.0 to 1.0) values. You set this option on the Levels tab of the Notes and Settings dialog. The image name can be changed on the Notes tab. This is also used as the default filename. The toolbar along the top of the QV window gives you access to most of QV's functions and settings. Each of these also has a keyboard shortcut.
QV maintains your default settings in a config file named qv4.cfg. This file can be located in several different places in your file system. QV looks for it in
The Windows USERPROFILE directory is the default location for user-specific settings. For Windows NT, this is usually a directory in WinNT\Profiles, while for Windows 2000 and XP it's usually in Documents and Settings. The LightWave Settings directory is the directory where LightWave's config file (lw3.cfg) resides. By default, this is the same as the USERPROFILE directory, but you can change this on the LightWave command line using the -c switch. The first time you run QV, you won't have a qv4.cfg. QV will create one in the directory where qv.p is and will find it there the next time it runs. You don't need to do anything to make this happen, and you may find this is entirely sufficient. But you might want to have different defaults for different projects or users. To do that, just copy the qv4.cfg that QV makes into the content directory, the LightWave Settings directory, or the USERPROFILE directory (or any combination of the three), and change the defaults within QV the next time it's invoked for that project, LightWave config or user. All render displays consume some memory for image storage, and this can become a concern if you're working near the limits of your system's memory capacity. QV needs a total of 20 bytes per pixel to store the floating-point and screen versions of each image. LightWave's Image Viewer FP render display needs a similar amount of memory when the image is viewed at 100%, but its requirements vary depending on the zoom level. Image Viewer creates a new, resampled image each time you zoom. At the highest zoom it supports (4x), Image Viewer FP requires 80 bytes per pixel, and the non-FP version requires 68. If you need to conserve memory, try the non-FP Image Viewer and view the image only at 100%, which should require only 4 bytes per pixel. QV displays an About dialog when you select QV40 as the current Render Display on the Render Options panel. The About dialog includes a build date for the qv.p file. This tells you which revision of qv.p you're running.
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