[mverta]

Just a quick step-by-step for rendering an animation from the command line on a single computer. This is covered in the manual and if you type in, "mxcl" at the command line, but it's never explicitly spelled out.

Let's say you export a 10-frame animation from your host program. You get 10 .mxs files named:

Test0001.mxs
Test0002.mxs
Test0003.mxs
Test0004.mxs
Test0005.mxs
Test0006.mxs
Test0007.mxs
Test0008.mxs
Test0009.mxs
Test0010.mxs

Here's what you type at the command line:

>mxcl -mxs:F:\Test.mxs -a:1-10 -o:F:\Test.tga

(In this case, the scene is located on my F drive.)

The -"mxs:" command is followed by your scene name minus the numbers.

The "-a:" command means, "animation" and the number range is the frame range you want to output. In this case, frames 1 through 10. You could also enter: -a:4;6;8-10 and that would render frame 4, frame 6, and frames 8 through 10.

The "-o:" command means, "output" and is where and what you want to call it. In this case, it will render Targa files at the F drive.

Notice that you don't need to put in numbers for either the .mxs files, or the output files. Mxcl will automatically name your output files (in the above example) as:
Test0001.tga
Test0002.tga
Test0003.tga
...and so on.

There are other commands you can enter into the command line to control everything from resolution to render priority, and once you understand this, you can add as many of those as you might need to. A full list will come up if you just type mxcl at a command line.

Some other examples:

>mxcl -mxs:C:\Maxwell_Scenes\BouncingBall.mxs -a:23-100 -o:F:\Test_Renders\HappyBall.tga

This command is telling Maxwell to render .mxs files in a folder on the C drive called, "Maxwell_Scenes". You've told it to render frames 23 to 100, so it's going to go looking in that folder for BouncingBall0023.mxs through BouncingBall0100.mxs. You're also telling it to write the rendered Targa frames onto your F drive, into a folder called, "Test_Renders". There it will render files called, "HappyBall0023.tga" through "HappyBall0100.tga".

Hope this helped!

_Mike