[polykat]

Hi!

I have a litle problem, if I want to network render an animation. Im Using Bongo to animate and a script similar to this http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... hp?t=28073 to export the mxs series. If i render one mxs alone localy or over the network eveything is fine. But if I start a network rendering where I open the first frame mxs and specify to render let's say from frame 0-25, each render is only the first frame.
In this http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... hp?t=27041 thread I learned that this could be because of "Cache MXS meshes" turned on while exporting. And in the help file of Maxwell for Rhino I read somewhere that a lot of cameras are created when using "Cache MXS meshes". So It seems that the animation function of the network rendering doesn't know, what camera to use.

Maybe my problem would be solved, if I use the "Maxwell_BeginAnimation" and the "Maxwell_BeginAnimation" command in my export rhino script, because actually i don't.

I really would like to keep using "Cache MXS meshes", because my scene is really complex and it saves a lot of time when exporting the scenes where only the camera is moving.

Can anyone help.

[JDHill]

Hi Polykat,

I would think that you really need to use BeginAnimation, because that is the only way that the plugin knows that you want to create a set of sequentially-named MXS files. If you are not using that command, I am curious: when you are trying to render with a:1-25, do you actually have 25 MXS files for Maxwell to render? I don't think you need to worry much about cached meshes, since the active camera is set in each MXS, regardless of how many cameras there are.

Let me know if any of that helps to straighten things out,

JD

[polykat]

Hi JD!

thanks for your reply! So you're working on sundays too
Yes I have 25 MXS files and each of them is rendered correctly if i start it alone (localy and network). Even if i render the sequence locally in one job (Maxwell Render -> File -> Open MXS: myfile_0001.mxs -> Render Options -> Animation -> Frames: 1-25), every frame is rendered like it should. Only when doing the same with network rendering (Maxwell Render -> Network -> Add -> MXS File: myfile_0001.mxs -> Animation -> Frames: 1-25), every frame rendered looks like frame 1. But if I network render Frame 5 (Maxwell Render -> Network -> Add -> MXS File: myfile_0005.mxs -> Animation -> Frames: empty) the rendered image looks like frame 5 should do.
I tried to insert BeginAnimation and EndAnimation in my script, but the problem remains...

[JDHill]

Okay, I played with this a bit and basically, you got it right in the first post: when setting up the network job, you can't specify a different camera for each file in the animation, so the issue is caused by extra cameras written when 'Cache MXS Meshes' is enabled. It should work fine (it does here) if you disable cached meshes. It probably wouldn't hurt to enable the 'Only Export Active Camera' option too, just to make sure there's only one camera in all the files, and therefore no possiblility of any file rendering the wrong camera.

[polykat]

Ok, thanks for your help JD. I will try that. By the way this problem didn't exist in 1.6.1 everything worked fine for me... Edit: Maybe I never used the Cache Option, because i always had moving geometry, and that's why I didn't experience this before.

[JDHill]

The cache is automatically invalidated whenever things besides cameras move, so if you were animating objects, it wouldn't have mattered if the feature was enabled or not.