[Toxie]

I am currently working on an animation project animated using Maya and rendering with Maxwell.

I know so far in order to render animation, every frame creates a different mxs file unless I do a batch render from Maya when rendering locally tho the render happens "inside" Maya and the Maxwell Render window doesn't come up.

I am planning using the network rendering feature to speed things up but I think it takes quiet a bit to export every single scene and create mxs for every frame.

Would it be possible first, running the Maxwell Render window when doing batch render in Maya?
and second, would it be possible to render an animation without creating a mxs file for every frame but a mxs for the whole sequence?

Thanks

[Mihnea Balta]

Maya batch always starts Maxwell in command line mode, so that Maxwell uses a node license and not a full GUI license. Unfortunately there's no way to change that right now. Why do you need to display the Maxwell window during a batch render?

The MXS format does not support animation, so you need to export a file for each frame. However, even if it did, the export time would be exactly the same. It doesn't matter if you append the data to a single file or create multiple files, the time is spent by getting the information from Maya and writing it to disk, and that doesn't change when you write to one file vs. multiple files.

You can avoid exporting all the frames up front if your distributed render system can use Maya directly. That way, each node will run Maya in batch mode and will export the MXS file when it needs to render. You won't be using the Maxwell network system in that case, so cooperative rendering on the same frame won't be possible, but if you have many more frames than render nodes that won't matter.

[Toxie]

Thanks for the quick response Mihnea.
I would like to display the Maxwell Render Window to view the render progress while is being calculate.
About exporting the mxs I think is just to save more space on the hard disk as we are rendering about 120 shots, and that means a lot of frames tho mxs
Cheers!

[hatts]

Maxwell References can be a massive help in saving space.