[lllab]

here some speed comparison:

i used the standard material scene with a wizard metal-all standard settings..

dual opteron275: sl10 3.55m bench 120.56

dual woodcrest 2.66-macpro under winxp32 sl10 2.49m bench 169.65

cheers
stefan

[sebbo]

ok back to the topic: rendering animation

we've used maxwell for several animations - in general it works pretty fine and has a very predictable rendertime compared to our experiance with mentalray.

coop rendering for seq:
doesn't really make sense, you are interessted in the sequence not in one frame - and in you network traffic?

filesize:
the mxs files are big but to be handled - switch off "include textures" and the file size drops rapidly to the one of your maya scene file.

output format:
rendering mxi, for us doesn't really makes sense at this stage. you would need to convert each frame and adjust your multilights for each frame by hand - maybe there is a other solution? i'd be intressted (batch script?)

export for anim:
we use studio only for a little faster workflow to setup the materials and textures. then import the materials in maya - test render. hide all geometry to the viewport (especialy when rendering mblur) then the export runs pretty fast.

NL has to improve the studio workflow for animation quiet a bit - it stange to type in your framerange etc in the command slot instead of having render globals for it. the mutilight feature should work recursivly; means i want to test render, adjust the ml settings export this settings into my plug in (mayall) then render the sequence. i also want a 16bit fileformat to avoid rendering mxi. and the biggest thing of all !!!!!!! i need renderlayer and mattes that render fast or mxr should output them while rendering - things like "use background shader" addressable objects in one rendering.

[Kabe]

filesize:
the mxs files are big but to be handled - switch off "include textures" and the file size drops rapidly to the one of your maya scene file.

Where can this be switched off?

If the materials are included, how comes it doens't render if textures are at wrong paths?

Why do that even simple Mats with no maps blow up the file size like this?

Thanks for any insight

Kabe

P.S.: Even if the maps are included, if a file compresses to 5% or less when zipped then the file format is a bit bloated...