[naxos]

Hello,

as the person in charge of software / hardware in a 3D highschool, we've bought 25 licenses, plus my personnal one...

We want to render animation with maxwell...

and i'm VERY disapointed about animation there :

- network works with animation, but no cooperative : each server renders a single frame...
- if you ask 3dsMAX (and others i guess) to save MXS file for a 100 frames animation, then it will save 100 MXS files...

that last point is bad... veeeeeery bad : my interior scene (not so complex) is about 36Mb in mxs format... so i'll need more than 3.6 Gb just without any rendered frames...

imagine one of my student would like to render with maxwell a 2.5 minutes short film ?...
25*2.5*60 = 3750 frames, so in that case, about 135 Gb for MXS files !!!!!

foool that behavior !!

sorry NL team, you've made a great great piece of soft here, but animation is unusable...

simply set MXS files to contains cameras / objects transform animation, and yes, animation will be possible...

Please Tom & co, tell us your feeling about that !

[daros]

- network works with animation, but no cooperative : each server renders a single frame...

[Edit]

It is not rentable to ditribute each frame on all nodes for animation.

[naxos]

yeah, in absolute meaning...
full render time will be the same...


but with real coop render, frames will be finished faster, and if we need them for photoshop stuff, then we can start working on them while next frames render

or just to asap get nice finished frames


of course, the second point is far away the most important one

maybe NL could buy 1000's of big HDD and sell MX users for cheap

[morbid angel]

lets put it in simple terms:
maxwell is not a tool for students to use on films.
maxwell is not the only one exporting the frames, render man, mental ray, brazil and vray can also do so.
as such its not recomended for simple film production in schools, Your render times will be so long you wont ever meet the deadline.

as far as the cooperative is concerned, its not designed to do coop on the network render, that is how do you think its going to work? you send 10 frames to 10 machines with coop and you think that 10 machines will segment the 10 frames between each other making it faster to render? the point of coop is to speed up setup time, prep of shots, not the final rendering. Infact the final rendering will be equivalent if not faster on animations then coop.

[daros]

ok...
a question because i'm courios...wat you doo with photoshop on a MR animation?

[Maxer]

This is a very bad problem not only in terms of storage but also network traffic. I'm dealing with this cooperative rendering problem the best I can but logistically speaking a high rez image creates a MXI file of 700 MB, and I'm using 100 render nodes so that means I'm going to have 70 GB of cooperative MXI files on all of my nodes. Since cooperative rendering doesn’t save my merged MXI file like it should I'm forced to manually combine all the MXI files together. To do that I have to move each MXI file from it's render node and rename it, then manually merge them together which takes my computer for ever.

From where I'm sitting V1 has brought nothing to the table that I didn't already have in the beta since I'm still only going to use the plugin, I'm not going to re-learn a new 3D app like Studio. Cooperative rendering is the only way we can produce print rez interior scenes in any reasonable amount of time and it's completely messed up. When will we see a fix for this problem?

[insomnia3d]

You should not have to use Photoshop for after effects on an animation, i am assuming that is why you use it. there are many other softwares out there like combustion, final cut,... to do after effects once the animation is assemble. If not i'll feel bad if you have to touch up a thousand frames for a single animation.
As far as animation with M~R, yes it can be done with a little creativity and a thinking cap. you might not be able to render 800 frames on astraight shot, but that is u to you to figure out with your skills and creativity.
Hope it works out for you.

[naxos]

lets put it in simple terms:
maxwell is not a tool for students to use on films.

don't agree : anyone bought licenses can produce films...

maxwell is not the only one exporting the frames, render man, mental ray, brazil and vray can also do so.

don't agree : FinalRender, Vray, MentalRay... quite all render engines can manage animation without exporting each frame a full 3D scene

as such its not recomended for simple film production in schools, Your render times will be so long you wont ever meet the deadline.

don't agree : in a 3D school, there are about 90 PCs ready for heavy renderfarm calculation...

as far as the cooperative is concerned, its not designed to do coop on the network render, that is how do you think its going to work? you send 10 frames to 10 machines with coop and you think that 10 machines will segment the 10 frames between each other making it faster to render? the point of coop is to speed up setup time, prep of shots, not the final rendering. Infact the final rendering will be equivalent if not faster on animations then coop.

can't agree, just because my english is too poor to understand that

[naxos]

ok...
a question because i'm courios...wat you doo with photoshop on a MR animation?

nevermind what... hey, students are strange guys full of ideas...

[naxos]

This is a very bad problem not only in terms of storage but also network traffic. I'm dealing with this cooperative rendering problem the best I can but logistically speaking a high rez image creates a MXI file of 700 MB, and I'm using 100 render nodes so that means I'm going to have 70 GB of cooperative MXI files on all of my nodes. Since cooperative rendering doesn’t save my merged MXI file like it should I'm forced to manually combine all the MXI files together. To do that I have to move each MXI file from it's render node and rename it, then manually merge them together which takes my computer for ever.

From where I'm sitting V1 has brought nothing to the table that I didn't already have in the beta since I'm still only going to use the plugin, I'm not going to re-learn a new 3D app like Studio. Cooperative rendering is the only way we can produce print rez interior scenes in any reasonable amount of time and it's completely messed up. When will we see a fix for this problem?

not toll true, since Emixer is a far new feature not in beta... so is hidden to camera, and some others
but ok, i understand your feeling...

[naxos]

You should not have to use Photoshop for after effects on an animation, i am assuming that is why you use it. there are many other softwares out there like combustion, final cut,... to do after effects once the animation is assemble. If not i'll feel bad if you have to touch up a thousand frames for a single animation.
As far as animation with M~R, yes it can be done with a little creativity and a thinking cap. you might not be able to render 800 frames on astraight shot, but that is u to you to figure out with your skills and creativity.
Hope it works out for you.

of course we can split animation into some 100 frames parts...
but please agree this is a mess to get 100 times the quite same MXS file, with only some objects with changed position, rotation or scale... and most of anims using maxwell will be camera flybies... so please, stop kidding me about my use of maxwell, and just try to think about a real animation support : hey !! i've spent 26 times the license price for that !!! should i tell my students to only create still images ?

i don't think so

[insomnia3d]

so please, stop kidding me about my use of maxwell, and just try to think about a real animation support : hey !! i've spent 26 times the license price for that !!! should i tell my students to only create still images ?

Sir nobody is kidding here. Trust me that ypu are not the only one dealing with these issues. If you don't believe just look at the forums. I, like Maxer and most of you, have encountered a huge learning curve; but we wouldn't be here if we did not think that M~R was worth/Cost beneffit analisys. However we can go forward and find the bugs so that NL can fix them, or just wait until they fix them. I agree with you that fuller animation support would be great, but as far as i know i have not seen a render engine that produces what M~R is able to... Good things come to those who wait; and i'm saying that; not the most patient person when it comes to that.

[naxos]

Yafray is a free rendering engine mostly used with blender...

yafray's animation solution is good :

it exports a scene file (like MXS), and a mesh file exernal...

only scene file is changed for each frame, then i guess yafray merges the 2 (scene and current frame's camera) and render it....

Maybe a fast solution could be that one : export separatelly all moving objects... and put in the MXS file sort of an "include" function

also, like Andron just told me : Keytoon did anim 15 min per frame...
so maxwell is usable for animation, not only for still pictures...

i'm not telling maxwell is bad or something : ask my students, i always say MaxwellRender at least once a day in good words... but please NL dev team, give us a way to render animation without the need of 500Gb HDD !

[naxos]

a friend of mine, coder one told me that it could export a MXS as usual, then a matrix file with frame-by-frame coordinates changes for each object...

ok, i guess another coder can understand that


also, what could save my HDD and my network speed could be simply compress data when MXS is written...

for ex. a simple 100*100*100 subdivs cube is about 7Mb in MXS, and only 20Ko zipped...

ok, time needed to compress / decompress datas, but ok, HDD place savec (plenty) and time saved sending over the network...

[morbid angel]

haha well i see, you are into an arguing war here, so good luck to you rendering in maxwell then.