[Neil Evans]

Hi

Does anyone know if instancing works with the new plugin? I have just set up a scene with about six trees and a handful of plants ready to export to create an animation and the mxs file is 1670mb per frame. I have instanced all the trees etc but it doesn't seem to have any effect.

What is it that wacks up the file sizes, geometry size or textures?

Is there a way to render an animation without having to export every single frame to file or do I need to buy a massive hard drive..

Cheers

Neil

[DrMerman]

Hey Neil. Maxwell at present does not support instanced geometry, so I imagine that all of your instanced objects are being converted to polys on export/at render time.

And yep, you'll need a massive drive At present you have to render every frame. Although saying this you could export one frame, render, delete the scene file, and then repeat. This could be done using a batch script, but it would obviously have to run for the entire time the renders run.

If you'd like I'll whip something up and add it to my toolset which'll be available in the coming days.

Cheers,
Dr Merman

[Neil Evans]

Hi Dr Merman

Guessed as much, it is a real shame the files are so big, and this is a small scene, I have a massive scene I was intending to animate with Maxwell, guess I will have to try another renderer..

The script would be really cool I guess I could set it to run on each render node with a batch of frames..Is that the idea?

Thanks for the reply

Neil

[Mihnea Balta]

Hi.

What DrMerman said about instancing is true, Maxwell (the renderer) doesn't currently support instanced geometry.

When rendering an animation in batch mode (either via Render -> Batch Render or with the command-line render.exe utility), the plug-in exports each frame, renders it and then deletes the MXS, so you don't end up with many 1.6 gigabyte files on your disk. :)

[Neil Evans]

Hi Mihnea

Thanks for that, that is cool but what happens when you have 10 machines that you want to run the animation on? I was intending to run the animation using RenderPal, but I guess this method would not work..

Any ideas? I have 4500 frames to animate for January The renders are taking 10mins per frame which is cool, it is just the file size problem I have to over come now..

[corneliu]

Hi Neil

I assume RenderPal will call a console on each client and start a mayabatch. (If so mayabatch will handle it right with the current plug-in)

So all you need is to be able edit the command line that is passed to the client
Another thing to take care is to have all textures with network paths assigned.

RenderPal will assign different frame chunks to each client.
Mayabatch will call the local exporter.
So the current problem is that the export will write the file to the current project folder.
This means to write a lot over the network. Mihnea will put an option to make export local so every chunk will be processed on the local client.

[EDIT] So after each frame the temp mxs file is deleted by mayabatch on the client and you do not have to take care of this problem

I hope this helps.

[Neil Evans]

Hi Corneliu

Renderpal actually opens the mxs files and renders using maxwell render. I will have to have a play and see if I can get it to render using Mayabatch instead. I guess another way would be to make a batch file for each machine and set it running on each machine manually. I am not too hot with batchfiles, do you have an idea as to what I would need to include in the file to run maxwell like you mentioned please?

Cheers

Neil

[corneliu]

Hi Neil,

All you have to do is very simple.
Maxwell works as any other batch renderer included in the maya renderer list.
So you just save the 4500 frame range inside you're maya project.
to make different batch files (you know just save them with the batch extension like render1.bat) you just alter the frame range for the different commands.

EX:
render -r maxwell -s 0 -e 10 -b 1 c:/projects/render_scene.mb (render using maxwell, start frame 0, end frame 10, by frame 1, the file to be rendered)
render -r maxwell -s 11 -e 20 -b 1 c:/projects/render_scene.mb
...

I think you can make some test with RenderPal choosing Maya as your render and include the "-r maxwell" switch in your command.
All other common switches should work for maxwell also like start frame, end frame, frame padding ... so on


You can take a look at the screen grab of the console at the end of this link.
http://www.maxwellrender.com/news/maya.html

The only problem I would take care of, and maybe you can set this through RenderPal is to output render data local... so the temp mxs is created locally.
If this does not work ... we can include something like this for the Maya plug-in.

[EDIT]
It is very good possible that if you have maxwell chosen as your current renderer in the Maya project file that you do not need to set the renderer switch in the command line

[Neil Evans]

Hi Corneliu

Thanks for that, I'll give it a go and get back to you.

By the way the new plugin is amazing! It has completely changed the way we work!

Cheers

Neil

[corneliu]

I just made a test and you have to use -r maxwell ... it does not take it's default from the scene

Thanks for your appreciation ... good luck with your project

[3dtrialpractice]

yes the mayabatch has to load maxwell with -r or it defaults to maya software.

I have tried this script approach with smedge2.0 But I came accross some major problems..

I thouhgt too Smaedge will break up the frames for me.. But right now what I get is That I set it for frames 1-100 in packet size of 10 (so that each machine renderes 10 frames)
What shoud happen is that render1 takes 1-10 render 2 takes 11-20.. etc

But what ends up happening for me is that render1, render2, render3 all start at frame 1.. so they dont know to start at different frames.

I'm still workin on it.. cuz I ve been doing it as a Generic script ill try to workit in w maya render setupin smedge..

The other major problem was also mentioned.. Saving the mxs files on a local drive.. Ie on the R; (render) drive.. sure it deletes the mxs after its finished.. but say I have 5 render computers on my farm. .then that means 5 mxs aare created on my R; drive.. where my Maya scene.mb file is.. on R:\render\scenes.. then 5 mxs files get created on R:\render\tmp... so this means the NETWORK traffic and hard drive uses for R computer is huge.. since the 5 render computers are constantly looking to theire Network R; drive to get the mxs file..
What smedge does wi a noremal maya.mb file is that the temp files are all moved and created locally on the c drive of all the render comuters so the only time R'snetwork and harddrive are being used is on download of the scene file and textures.. (once per packet) and then on completeion upload of the rendered image.

this would be sweet if it got resolved in the maya plugin.. But i may fear that it would have to be a thing that renderPal or smedge have to support a specific template for maxwell via mayabatch.. so these render clients themselves would have to "support" maxwell via maya.

Im gonna keep messing around with rendering via mb file.. for now I use the multiple batch file aproach.. where I creat a new bat file for each render machine ..this already is SOOO much better than what i was doing by creating hundreds of mxs files and sorting them thru my network..

SO thanks Mihnea Balta and progrmers for just letting us use maxwell via the mayabatch--
just this already saves alot of disk space/work!

[Neil Evans]

Hi again

I ran some tests last night. To start with just on one machine, batch rendering straight out of Maya...and I hit a problem. The rendering seems to stop after 20 frames. I set it running last night frames 1 to 80, got in this morning and it had stopped at frame 20. I then set it to render from frame 20-80 and left it until now, it stopped at frame 40. Has anyone else experienced this?

I also think the write to local check box would be a great idea. Especially if we could get it before christmas please??

[corneliu]

Hi Neil,

There is a memory leak issue with mayabatch.
If you leave the Windows task manager open, you can see how memory usage will increase from frame to frame.
In your case after 20 frames mayabatch will crash.
This seems to be a Maya bug we are currently working on.
The "write local" switch is not a big problem but until the memory issue is fixed it maybe not much help.

[Neil Evans]

Hi Corneliu

Ah, ok. So I guess the best way to animate at the moment is by creating the files. Not to worry.

Good luck with the fixes.

Cheers

Neil