Photoworks.....Is it just me

Is it just me or does the preview window tell a different tale than
the actual rendering. I mean whats is that window looks amazing, when
I render...well I get this look on my face, you know the one you get
after you have sucked on a lime. Granted been using it for a long time
and I get out what I need, but it would just be nice....

or am I still in crazy man world with all the crazy ppl??!

 

You probably already know that the preview window does not support indirect
illumination (at least through 2004 - didn't bother to check 2005). You
also are proabaly aware that you can turn off rendering features in the
preview window, so you wont get lights, reflectance, etc... in the preview
that you will see in the final render to screen. If you have a reflective
environment (like a sphere environment) and yur parts are even a little
mirrored you may get different results because of a long standing bug where
the environemnt in the preview window does not match the mapping of the
environment when rendering to screen/file. If you checked all of that out
and its not the cause, then I'm stumped

For what its worth, I stopped using the preview window years ago, and just
do test renders to a small pane on a split vieport. You don't have to worry
about immediate/deferred rendering because the 'preview' is always only on
demand, adjusting the size of the split pane helps drive the render time,
and you always, always, always get exactly what you see in the 'preview'.
Its worked out great for me

 

It could be your preview window settings. Is the preview set to raytrace or
openGL render?