When exporting a SDL file

• Delete all non-referenced shaders before exporting an SDL file, because all shaders, whether they are actually assigned to surfaces or not, are written out to the SDL file.
• When you export an SDL file, each perspective window will generate an image (or series of images) when the SDL file is rendered, because each perspective window has an associated camera.

  The file name you use for the SDL file is also used within the SDL file to specify the output image file name. For example, if the SDL file is named Planet, then the camera section of the SDL file will contain:

  pix = "pix/Planet",

  If there is a second perspective camera named camera2, the SDL file will also contain:

  pix ="pix/Planet_camera2",

  If you have more than one perspective window, but only want to render an image (or series of images) from one of them, either edit the SDL file, or pick all objects, lights, and only one camera, and then choose File > Export > Active as, and use that file to export an SDL file from.

• By default, comments are not included in the SDL file. If you want comments included, put the following line in your shell before starting Alias:

  setenv ALIAS_SDL_LONGFORM 1

To edit an SDL file

To edit an SDL file, you must first convert it to ASCII format (text), using the Alias Binary SDL command-line utility (bsdl). This utility allows you to extract the text component from a binary SDL file, and replace the text component in a binary SDL file. This is useful if you need to hand-edit an SDL file.

SDL files now contain a binary component for large mesh files, because writing the data out as text would increase the size of the SDL file to an extent that parsing time by the renderer would also increase by a very large amount.