[sidenimjay]

this is my first posting of a wish, hope it is well received and has not been mentioned before.

i have noticed that when dealing with large data sets, writing the mxi files can take a few minutes (unless there is a bug in the maya plugin or memory leak in maxwell). having said that, it would be nice to have a renderman RIB archiving type structure.

An archive is simply a stripped down .mxi files that contain only the geometry, materials and object pertinent lights, such as headlights in a car model, that are needed to render that object.

then when the camera and animation is finaly hashed out, the camera, lighting and non-archived objects are written then merged with the archived .mxi files at rendertime.

works especially well when rendering tonnes of buildings or other non-animating geos, but could also be used when rendering cycled animations,such as animated characters for crowd scenes.

lots of unecessarry mxi write time could be better spent on render time!

there are other benefits to using the archive method as well, such as delayed archiving which would only call the archived object when it is encountered in the current bucket, used as an aid in memory control.

hows that sound?