[choo-chee]

I have a few sequences to render.
However using the "export all" method creates tons of MXS files. I have to copy about 150 GB of MXS to the rendering computer...
And the animation is a simple fly-through, only camera moving on a specified path.
Is there a way to export just 1 MXS with the camera info inside ?
thanx !

[Mihnea Balta]

Export the static scene as a MXS file, then create a MXS reference in another scene which contains just the animated camera. It will still export one MXS file per frame, but the file will be very small, since it doesn't contain any geometry.

[choo-chee]

Nice idea, I'l try.

[choo-chee]

well another question... actually can I use it on scenes that already has MXS references inside? like many trees etc. ?
I remember that it's impossible to have an MXS inside another MXS ...

[choo-chee]

well here's thought.
This method is very poor making me copy 15 GB of *.mxs files (and that's only 1 scene...) to another PC for render.
Why can't we have the camera path stored inside a single MXS like all other 3d software?
You know, when in FIRE, you can move the camera and the scene will not re-voxelize or re-load MXS references... so why can't we have
it in the scene's MXS and that's it....?

[Mihnea Balta]

Because MXS files do not contain animation information, and most likely never will. I'm not sure what you mean by "all other 3D software", because no major render engine supports animations in its native file format: .mi files don't (mental ray), .rib files don't (renderman), .ass files don't (Arnold) etc. Adding animation support in one way or another is quite a lot of work; adding an animation system which can use data coming from several animation packages (Maya, Max, Lightwave etc.) at the same time is basically impossible.

Recursive references are not supported in the engine as far as I know. If this is a problem, you can try to submit the Maya scene to the render farm and have Maya export it to MXS on each render node. This is a common solution, but you need to have Maya installed on each render machine.

[choo-chee]

well I understand.
However I still think that for camera motion only, it's unnecessary to reload all the scene again and again,right?
All needed is to get the new X,Y,Z of the camera and redo voxelization and rendering...

[Mihnea Balta]

Storing some form of camera animation and rendering from a single file is of course possible in theory, but it's not implemented in the engine at the moment. Maxwell 3.1 has support for rendering simple turntable animations from a single file, but I don't know if there are plans to develop this feature further.