Make a pass non-renderable?

[Byron Nash]

I am using REBUS render farm and it seems to be pretty quick and economical. It only seems to render the whole scene however. Is there an easy way to make passes not render when you hit render all? I assume that's sort of what this farm is doing. 

[Stephen Davidson]

I cheat it by setting the start and stop frames to zero (I still get one frame)

I would also like the ability to make a pass non-renderable.

It is great for tweaking a scene after you have all your passes created.

I also can create a pass called "do not render" and make the view visibility and render visibility

"no effect on members" and the pass name hopefully will remind me to 

remove it just prior to render.

Again, not perfect, but it works for me.

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Byron Nash <byro...@gmail.com> wrote:

I am using REBUS render farm and it seems to be pretty quick and economical. It only seems to render the whole scene however. Is there an easy way to make passes not render when you hit render all? I assume that's sort of what this farm is doing. 

--

Best Regards,
  Stephen P. Davidson 
       (954) 552-7956
    sdav...@3Danimationmagic.com

My Website is GREEN, Is yours?

[Tim Crowson]

If  you disable the Main framebuffer, does that do it? On my machine it throws an error (Unspecified Failure), but at least it doesn't render.

Seems sloppy to have to do that though.

On 7/19/2012 2:30 PM, Byron Nash wrote:

I am using REBUS render farm and it seems to be pretty quick and economical. It only seems to render the whole scene however. Is there an easy way to make passes not render when you hit render all? I assume that's sort of what this farm is doing. 

--
 

Tim Crowson
Lead CG Artist

Magnetic Dreams Animation Studio, Inc.
2525 Lebanon Pike, Building C. Nashville, TN 37214
Ph  615.885.6801 | Fax  615.889.4768 | www.magneticdreams.com
tim.c...@magneticdreams.com

 

[Gene Crucean]

Delete it?

:D

--
Gene Crucean - Emmy winning - Oscar nominated VFX Supervisor / iOS-OSX
Developer / Filmmaker / Photographer
** Freelance for hire **
www.genecrucean.com

~~ Please use my website's contact form on www.genecrucean.com for any
personal emails. Thanks. I may not get them at this address. ~~

[Eric Thivierge]

Set the pass to render with a camera that is hidden?

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

[Stephen Davidson]

Upon experimentation,  disabling the main frame-buffer (un-checking it) seems to be

 the best solution. It produces an error, but does continue to render the rest of the passes.

I know this seems like it is something that you wouldn't use, but when you have a dozen

passes created, all with render flags turned off for certain objects , along with

specific materials assigned to certain partitions, with a few overrides set,  and all of a sudden

your client want to make changes to the model and/or materials ...

... having a pass that has everything visible and select-able, but doesn't render, can be REALLY useful.

[Byron Nash]

I'll try the checkbox on the frame buffer with the farm and see what happens. It would be useful to have a boolean per pass sort of like Maya does so you could still hit render all but ignore certain passes. 

[Stephen Davidson]

I can check which passes that I want to render using Kim Aldis's (remember Kim?)

KA_BatchMaker script. I doubt it could work over a render farm, however.

The script is quite old, and it produces errors (none that effect the render)

but it works great with two machines, networked, and using the skip already rendered

function. I have not found anything that can replace it. I tried some complex

render management software, but too complex for me. ;)

I have been tempted to try and modify the script to work with current commands,

but I am no programmer, and would be a learning experience, at best.

BTW Kim no longer has this script on his site.

I'm sure if you ask him nice.... :)

Kim, you still lurking out there?

[Marc-Andre Carbonneau]

Halim has it implemented inside his HKPassDumper plugin. Might be more up to date.

 

Check it out here:

http://hnegadi.myftp.org/resources.html

 

MAC

--

My Website is GREEN, Is yours?

[Byron Nash]

KA_Batchmaker is great. I use it a good bit. I'll have to look into HKPassDumper, thanks for the tip MAC.

[Stephen Davidson]

Thanks, MAC. Looks good. I'll give it a try.

On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Marc-Andre Carbonneau <marc-andre...@ubisoft.com> wrote:

[Chris Chia]

1 advice:
I would customised the render farm to take in the -pass flag from your submission page (add an input box or something to grab user's inputs) and pass the following command (if input box is not empty) to render farm.


xsibatch -render myscene.scn -pass mypassName



Else if no input:

xsibatch -render myscene.scn


Chris

[Byron Nash]

I put in a feature request at REBUS to enable and they just said to delete the passes. That's a lame response. I am sure their system is sending those batch commands somewhere along the way. They just need to open it up just enough to let someone add those pass flags. I do use those a lot in the command line locally.

[Chris Chia]

If render queue doesn't allow such customisation, then dump it.
Have u tried DrQueue?

Anyone would like to share their renderqueue system?

Chris

On 21 Jul, 2012, at 10:05 AM, "Byron Nash" <byro...@gmail.com<mailto:byro...@gmail.com>> wrote:

I put in a feature request at REBUS to enable and they just said to delete the passes. That's a lame response. I am sure their system is sending those batch commands somewhere along the way. They just need to open it up just enough to let someone add those pass flags. I do use those a lot in the command line locally.

On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 9:42 PM, Chris Chia <chris...@autodesk.com<mailto:chris...@autodesk.com>> wrote:
1 advice:
I would customised the render farm to take in the -pass flag from your submission page (add an input box or something to grab user's inputs) and pass the following command (if input box is not empty) to render farm.


xsibatch -render myscene.scn -pass mypassName



Else if no input:

xsibatch -render myscene.scn


Chris

[Stephen Davidson]

That is lame. Other than that, how do you like Rebus for rendering?

[Stephen Davidson]

I tried SquidNet, once but it was too complex and I never could get it to run with Softimage.

Too bad, because it also works with After Effects. The docs were not that helpful.

It was a while ago. It may be better, now, I don't know.

[RuiSantos]

Hi guys,

 

First i used to handwrite my own batch scripts...then moved on to Kim' BatchMaker,although i had to hand correct/add some features ,like diferent settings for diferent machines capabilities,matte passes for the weakest machine, etc.. 

So i ended up having several scripts based on the KA BatchMaker's generated one...and it  worked very nicely for a long time...

Because i have just 2 machines for render,i didn't feel the need for a full render manager.

 

I discovered Thinkbox Deadline a while ago,and it's my workhorse managing renderings nowadays..

It's "free" if you have 2 render machines,and it works very well with softimage and other vendors,it has an addon the allows you to submit your renders from inside softimage,remote acess to manage your renders,assigns passes to specific machines,creates dependencies,like this pass renders before that one...etc..etc...i mean it's really nice and EASY to set up.

 

If you have a small shop,i have a go and try it..

 

later,

Rui

www.ruisantos3d.com

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Stephen Davidson

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2012 6:15 AM

Subject: Re: Make a pass non-renderable?

[Stephen Davidson]

Thanks, Rui. That looks interesting. I will give it a try when I have some downtime to install

and test.

[Carl Callewaert]

FYI: http://s2012.siggraph.org/attendees/acm-siggraph-organization-events
Unity workshop and Autodesk Education at Siggraph Education

c

[Sandy Sutherland]

RR can be used free with 3 machines I think - meant to be trial, but worth testing - it works very well - we use it on our farm and rendered last weekend 6000 stereo frames at film res.

S.

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor
sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za
_____________________________

---

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Stephen Davidson [magi...@bellsouth.net]
Sent: 21 July 2012 18:46
To: RuiSantos; soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

[Eric Turman]

Royal Render is top notch. I can not say enough good things about it.

--




-=T=-

[Alan Fregtman]

Royal Render is made from fire-breathing eagles that shoot lasers of awesomeness...

Also it's very good.

[Eric Thivierge]

Not sure if Holger will take that as a compliment or insult? :D

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

[Byron Nash]

I have used Royal Render in the past and found it to be really nice. The system I'm trying to use is a remote render service called REBUS. rebusfarm.net. I've found it so far to be fairly straightforward. It has a check feature that will go through and verify everything is cool before sending. There are not really any options to choose, it just sends the whole scene. Speed seems good and the manager app is decent for pulling files back off the server. We used it with Maya on a job last year and it worked fine. REBUS is the only online renderer that I have found that supports Softimage 2013. 

[RuiSantos]

Yeah,RR is also a great render manager...

When i tried it i was very pressed for time..and i couldn't make it work..but i will try it again for sure!

I have heard nothing but good stuff about it..

 

later...

[Tim Crowson]

We use RR as well and have had no real problems with it. Works smoothly with all our apps.
-Tim Crowson
Magnetic Dreams

--

 

 

[Stephen Davidson]

The one thing that stopped me from trying Royal Render is that you must have a static IP

address on all machines. It does not support DHCP, as far as I can tell.

And, since I am using DHCP.... 

[Francisco]

Hi to everyone,

i´m beginning pre production of a cg animated feature in Mexico, and we are looking for other studios specialized in character modeling and rigging.
Professional freelances are also welcome, so if any of you guys know someone to recommend, i´ll apreciate the feedback.
Thanks in advance.

Francisco Criado
CG Technical Director
Huevocartoon Producciones

[Sandy Sutherland]

It does - it works off the Hardware address - we are runnin dynamic IPs here and it works fine.

S.

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor
sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za
_____________________________

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Stephen Davidson [magi...@bellsouth.net]

Sent: 23 July 2012 17:51
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com

Subject: Re: Make a pass non-renderable?

[Stephen Davidson]

the installation guide says, specifically, to set the IP as static for RRserver.

Are you using RRserver? If it does work with DHCP, that would be great.

[Sandy Sutherland]

Our actual server machine that we are running RR off is static - but all our workstations are dynamic.  The LX nodes are static mainly as we deploy them by script and ssh onto them using their ips - which match the name - egg1 for e.g. is 192.168.1.101.  So yes it definitely does work - I think that the guide is aimed at setting the server to static.

RR uses the hardware address on the machines - we found this out when we got confused when a machine we renamed appeared as the old name - it picked it up out of the client database using its HW address.

Cheers

S.

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor
sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za
_____________________________

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Stephen Davidson [magi...@bellsouth.net]

Sent: 23 July 2012 19:10

[Stephen Davidson]

Thanks for the info, Sandy. That makes sense, now.

Not a huge deal to make the server static. I was

cringing at having to change all my client's pc's to

static. :) I am working on a experiment that uses my

clients pc's networked to make render farms for

all my clients. Sort of a render commune. :)

[Chris Chia]

Nice to have everyone sharing their renderfarm info. Seems like RR is the trend...

Chris

On 24 Jul, 2012, at 3:36 AM, "Stephen Davidson" <magi...@bellsouth.net<mailto:magi...@bellsouth.net>> wrote:

Thanks for the info, Sandy. That makes sense, now.
Not a huge deal to make the server static. I was
cringing at having to change all my client's pc's to
static. :) I am working on a experiment that uses my
clients pc's networked to make render farms for
all my clients. Sort of a render commune. :)

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 1:41 PM, Sandy Sutherland <Sandy.Su...@triggerfish.co.za<mailto:Sandy.Su...@triggerfish.co.za>> wrote:
Our actual server machine that we are running RR off is static - but all our workstations are dynamic. The LX nodes are static mainly as we deploy them by script and ssh onto them using their ips - which match the name - egg1 for e.g. is 192.168.1.101. So yes it definitely does work - I think that the guide is aimed at setting the server to static.

RR uses the hardware address on the machines - we found this out when we got confused when a machine we renamed appeared as the old name - it picked it up out of the client database using its HW address.

Cheers


S.

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor

sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za<mailto:sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za>
_____________________________




________________________________
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com> [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com>] on behalf of Stephen Davidson [magi...@bellsouth.net<mailto:magi...@bellsouth.net>]

Sent: 23 July 2012 19:10

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:soft...@listproc.autodesk.com>

Subject: Re: Make a pass non-renderable?

the installation guide says, specifically, to set the IP as static for RRserver.
Are you using RRserver? If it does work with DHCP, that would be great.

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 12:27 PM, Sandy Sutherland <Sandy.Su...@triggerfish.co.za<mailto:Sandy.Su...@triggerfish.co.za>> wrote:
It does - it works off the Hardware address - we are runnin dynamic IPs here and it works fine.


S.

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor

sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za<mailto:sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za>
_____________________________




________________________________
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com> [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com>] on behalf of Stephen Davidson [magi...@bellsouth.net<mailto:magi...@bellsouth.net>]

Sent: 23 July 2012 17:51

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:soft...@listproc.autodesk.com>

Subject: Re: Make a pass non-renderable?

The one thing that stopped me from trying Royal Render is that you must have a static IP
address on all machines. It does not support DHCP, as far as I can tell.
And, since I am using DHCP....

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 11:10 AM, Tim Crowson <tim.c...@magneticdreams.com<mailto:tim.c...@magneticdreams.com>> wrote:
We use RR as well and have had no real problems with it. Works smoothly with all our apps.
-Tim Crowson
Magnetic Dreams



On 7/23/2012 8:54 AM, Byron Nash wrote:

I have used Royal Render in the past and found it to be really nice. The system I'm trying to use is a remote render service called REBUS. rebusfarm.net<http://rebusfarm.net>. I've found it so far to be fairly straightforward. It has a check feature that will go through and verify everything is cool before sending. There are not really any options to choose, it just sends the whole scene. Speed seems good and the manager app is decent for pulling files back off the server. We used it with Maya on a job last year and it worked fine. REBUS is the only online renderer that I have found that supports Softimage 2013.

On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 8:37 PM, Eric Thivierge <ethiv...@gmail.com<mailto:ethiv...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Not sure if Holger will take that as a compliment or insult? :D


--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 10:33 AM, Alan Fregtman <alan.f...@gmail.com<mailto:alan.f...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Royal Render is made from fire-breathing eagles that shoot lasers of awesomeness...


--









--


Best Regards,
Stephen P. Davidson

(954) 552-7956<tel:%28954%29%20552-7956>
sdav...@3Danimationmagic.com<mailto:sdav...@3Danimationmagic.com>

[cid:]

<http://www.3danimationmagic.com>

My Website is GREEN, Is yours?

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--


Best Regards,
Stephen P. Davidson

(954) 552-7956<tel:%28954%29%20552-7956>
sdav...@3Danimationmagic.com<mailto:sdav...@3Danimationmagic.com>

[cid:]

<http://www.3danimationmagic.com>

My Website is GREEN, Is yours?

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--


Best Regards,
Stephen P. Davidson
(954) 552-7956

sdav...@3Danimationmagic.com<mailto:sdav...@3Danimationmagic.com>

[http://www.3danimationmagic.com/3Danimation_magic_logo_sign.jpg]

<http://www.3danimationmagic.com>

My Website is GREEN, Is yours?

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