Skip rendered frames in FXTree

[Aumakua]

Hello,

I wonder if there is a way to have FXTree skip rendered frames in a compositing, like MR does..?

[luceric]

I believe it does not.
would that really save you a lot of time?

[Aumakua]

Hello luceric,

Yes, I do believe so... you see, at work we need to use our farm with FXTree and it's really a problem not to be able to have this option.. (not to mention the need to import and export separate FXTrees into an XSI scene). And also it would be awesome to have the currently rendered frame number somewhere close to the FXTree render progress bar.. :)

[adam_seeley@yahoo.com]

You may be able to import/export fxtrees if you place them under a Model first.

Adam.

[EdHarriss]

Skip rendered frames would be nice.
It's a feature in After Effects that has save me a lot of time.

It's no that I'm too lazy to go in and set a different range in the output node, it's that I might forget at 3am when I'm trying to finish up a job that's due at 8am that morning.

[Aumakua]

Adam: thank you so much ! i wonder why i didn't think of it sooner :)

EdHarriss: Yeah, it would be really great. Cause we can't afford to buy another render manager for our farm either, that supports FXTree network rendering, like Royal Render for instance (we've already bought Mental Queue with no support for FXTree jobs), so we would more than welcome such feature in FXTree.

[luceric]

How much time does it take you to render your fxtree? Normally it should only be a few seconds per frame, so I'm surprised that this would be critical to finish a job in time.
The fxtree does heavy caching, as well, to optimize frames that are similar.

[Aumakua]

Well, for our current project which is almost done, we had to complete several sequences in dome master format (3200x3200) so we used FXTree to composite our passes.
It was really efficient to do our (not too complicated really) compositing with FXTree
but since our available machines were not of equal horsepower (old single core and new dual core xeons) we had some machines finish first and stay idle, while some others were struggling with their FXTree share.
For example, my "own" workstation (single core xeon) needs about an hour for 250 frames of a given sequence, while one of the dual core ones finishes it in 20 minutes or so.
So, in order to load some more frames to the new pcs we had to stop the old ones and rearrange the frames sequence jobs, something a bit frustrating and riskfull (to lose some frames during the FXTree stop and rearrange).

[luceric]

thanks for the info, that makes sense

[Aumakua]

I'll be glad to help further, FXTree is an awesome toolset of XSI.

[CiaranM]

You may be able to import/export fxtrees if you place them under a Model first.

Adam.

I think you can treat an FX tree as a referenced model, also. Might be handy to have.

[amaan]

u can also copy/paste fx trees between different instances of XSI.

-select and copy all nodes from an fx tree
-launch new XSI & switch to compositing view
-select File->New Tree (if there isn't an FXtree already in the scene already)
-paste

[Aumakua]

Interesting workflow amaan, thank you ;)