[locos77]

I set up a quick fly-through in rhino, it was rendering fine the first 10 frames then i get a dark frame and the camera gets flip to different angle.. Weird.. Now is rendering every frame in reverse. Like if I am walking backwards.. ?

any ideas?

[JDHill]

Can I assume it also flips if you render the animation using Rhino Render? I do know that when the rhino camera gets to certain positions, usually when its view axis is nearly orthogonal, that the roll on it sometimes flips randomly...is that like what you're seeing here?

[locos77]

I did a quick rendering withe the rhino render engine, and the fly-through is fine.. no camera flip or rendering in reverse.....

any ideas?

[JDHill]

Not really; the issue is too specific for me to speculate. If you can remove most of the geometry from the file, zip it up, and email it to me, I'll take a look here and try to determine what the root cause is.

[locos77]

Is strange.. I did another quick animation and rendered fine in maxwell. I repeated again the same scene and I am getting dark frames (images) weird..and the camera angle has changed. Only thing I changed was the amount of frames...

do you have an email?

[JDHill]

Sorry, I thought it should've been shown in my profile...here it is: jeremy<at>nextlimit<dot>com

[JDHill]

Firstly, I don't know if it is affecting this animation issue, but immediately when I open your file, Rhino tells me this 18 times:



Secondly, and not related to the problem, is that when you are exporting a camera-only animation, it is really helpful to turn on cached meshes in Scene Manager > Output > Export > Cached meshes. Doing so means that the plugin won't have to export every single mesh point and vertex over and over, since they are not changing - it will just move the camera around and write another mxs file for each frame.

Lastly, and on the issue at hand, unfortunately, I've exported and rendered all 149 frames three times now and not been able to duplicate the issue so far. Could you let me know exactly which versions of Rhino, the plugin, and Maxwell you are using, just so I can make sure we're on the same page?

Thanks...

[locos77]

strange I don't get that error message.

Thanks for the tip on cached meshes...

Is strange because it does it sporadically..

Using

1.8.3.0 maxwell rhino plug in.

1.70 Maxwell 64bit

version 4.0 sr5b rhino..

thanks..

[JDHill]

Probably, one time or another, you got that message from another model, got a bit annoyed by it, checked the 'Turn off automatic checking' box and hit OK...and never saw it again. If you want to re-enable it, just type 'CheckNewObjects' in the command line, hit Enter, and click 'Yes' in the dialog that comes up...that will get it working again.

The only differences I see between your setup and mine is that I'm using Rhino SR5 and Maxwell 1.7.1. I don't think that difference would explain the problem though. The fact is that the animation tools in Rhino are just based on some old scripts, and in my experience, they can often behave somewhat erratically. I was hoping that I could run your animation and see where it was putting the camera into a strange place...then I could tell you, 'oh, well, just remove this knot from your path curve because it's causing a funny camera to be generated at that point'. So, I'll try to run it a few more times and see, but to be honest, the plugin just exports whatever camera position that Rhino tells it exists, so if it ends up in a weird place, that's really just that - there is no analytical way for the plugin to look at any given camera position and say 'hmm..I doubt that's correct'.

That said, if you do get something that's consistently repeatable, where I could positively identify a specific issue, then I could probably code around that in the future.