[rusteberg]

is it possible to assign the preview engine to an animation job via network?

i looked through updated manual and new notes but couldnt find anything on this. did i miss something?

would be really helpful considering i did some quick tests earlier today and 15-30 second render times for animated scene frames were quite adequate to work with in post... i'm thinking there would be a command line option for this, but again maybe i overlooked something.

thanks.

[juan]

Hi Rusteberg,

It is not supported rendering in Preview (Draft in the UI) mode in the network yet. The reasons is that the draft engine does not generate an MXI file, therefore it cannot be merged nor resumed. It brings up some funny complexities that make it difficult to make it to work over a network properly, since the Maxwell network assumes there is an MXI file associated with a task. We will see how to make it possible for animations in the future (for cooperative renders is not possible for the reason already explained)

Said that, I understand using the preview render for quick previews of animations is very useful. But in that case I think that you might not need the network. If the render takes 15-30 seconds it is probably faster to launch the animation in draft mode in your local machine rather than transfer all the frames, textures, etc.

But well, we will look into this anyway :)

Juan

[rusteberg]

thanks for the reply, juan.

Said that, I understand using the preview render for quick previews of animations is very useful. But in that case I think that you might not need the network. If the render takes 15-30 seconds it is probably faster to launch the animation in draft mode in your local machine rather than transfer all the frames, textures, etc.

well this was my first thought (running off workstation due to low render times), but when activating active shade (rendering through max) underneath my common parameters tab for "time output" it gets grayed out and locked to single.... have not tried it, but are you saying that it is possible to render these type of "test" animations using the new preview engine? if so, why are my "time output" options grayed out as well as my "render output" option to save each image file? (im in max 2009, btw)

or have i missed something else that enables me to preview animations within the active shade window via mode preferences? please advise what process for previewing such a thing is applicable for the time being....

one other thing i notice is that motion blur does not get translated through preview engine.... just something i noticed and wanted to pass along... one minute tests of same frame below:

FIRE render:



Maxwell Console:

s/1minutelyh_realengine.jpg[/img]

[Mihnea Balta]

ActiveShade doesn't support animations. That's a Max thing, it's part of their design. We will have to implement a separate mode for rendering animation previews with FIRE.

Motion blur isn't supported in the Max and Maya plug-ins yet. The engine supports it, but we need to do a bit more work on the plug-in side to export the necessary data to it. We will try to implement it in a future build, but it's not straightforward to get the motion data out of Maya and Max without moving the time slider (and you don't want the time to change while you're moving or rotating an object, it would wreak havoc in the host application).

[rusteberg]

thanks for the info, mihnea.... active shade is something new to me..

i noticed that i can flag -rs:0 to run a draft out of max, but image output specified in the common render tab will write a blank(black) file.
turning that off and adding an output path manually -o:path won't even write the file. however i'm able to save the image directly out of maxwell render....

kind of like this:

[Mihnea Balta]

:))

We'll add that draft mode to the plug-ins in the next update, so you won't need to fiddle with command-line parameters.