Camera Control panel
While a raytrace board is active, open Camera Control to frame the scene exactly the way you want it. The panel is
modeless — you can keep it open while you play or analyse. Changes apply live: every slider movement restarts the
renderer at the new viewpoint.
Gaze point — the point in space that the camera is aimed at.
- Preset — drop-down list of common look-at points (e.g. centre of the board, individual files or ranks).
- X, Y, Z sliders — fine-tune the gaze position along each axis (range ±25).
Camera position — where the camera sits in space, expressed as azimuth, altitude and radius.
- Preset — drop-down list of common viewpoints (low angle behind White, opposite side, top-down, etc.).
- Azimuth — horizontal rotation of the camera around the board.
- Altitude — vertical angle of the camera above the board (0° at table height, 90° straight down).
- Distance — how far the camera sits from the board (1 = very close, 99 = far away).
Close — hides the panel. The current camera setting is kept.
Tip — the same camera moves are available from the keyboard while the raytrace board has focus:
- , / . — swing the camera left or right.
- Page Up / Page Down — tilt up or down.
- + / − — zoom in or out.
- 9 / 0 — nudge the gaze point sideways.
- I / O — push the gaze point forward or back.
- V — auto-fit the whole board into the frame.
- W — remember the current camera.
- F7 — restore the remembered camera.
- J — toggle a slow auto-rotation around the board.
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Lights panel
The Lights panel lets you compose the lighting of the scene from scratch. It is modeless and the image updates live.
The central list shows the lights currently in the scene. Selecting an entry reveals its parameters in the lower part
of the dialog.
Add a light — five buttons each add a new light of the chosen type:
- Ambient — a constant base illumination that lifts the whole image out of shadow.
- Directional — parallel rays from a fixed direction, like the sun on a clear day.
- Sun — a physically based sun light with realistic intensity and colour temperature.
- Spot — a cone-shaped light with adjustable opening angle and penumbra.
- Point — an omni-directional light, equivalent to a bare bulb.
Edit — opens an editor for the selected light: intensity, colour, position, the point it shines at, and (for
spotlights) the opening and penumbra angles. The position can also be picked directly on the board.
Move — re-positions the selected light using the on-board picker.
Remove — deletes the selected light.
Delete all — clears the scene of all lights. Use this before composing a new lighting setup from scratch.
Reset — restores the default lighting that ships with the active scene.
Save / Load — store and reload the entire lighting setup as a file. Useful when you have built a setup you want to
reuse across scenes or share with a colleague.
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Notes for users
- The renderer runs in the background and uses every CPU core it is allowed. The quality figure in the status bar
climbs toward 100% as the image converges; you can keep moving the camera at any time — the renderer simply restarts.
- The current camera and lighting are stored with the scene and restored the next time you open it.
- Save in the Camera Control panel saves only the viewpoint (a .camerasettings file); Save in the Lights panel saves
only the lighting. The two are independent and can be combined freely.