Expression Evaluations with Batch Render

[lokm]

I have some expressions in my animation that depends on the previous frames. The animation works fine when it plays frame by frame from the beginning, but would yield incorrect result when skipped playback of some previous frames. When I send this to Deadline Render Management System, it skips to and render a specific frame of a sequence. Is there a way to tell Batch Render to evaluate the expressions of all the frames before each frame?

[Nightwalker]

Can't you bake the animation before sending to render ?

[thiago]

soft constraints/expressions/any other thing that blend here and there must be baked
before send to a render farm.

edit- Suggestion:
Make a pipeline with Point Oven. It's flawless for renderfarms.

[lokm]

I was trying to avoid that because I want to keep the constraints dynamic... a pipeline that bake the animation sounds like a good solution. Thank you for your advices!

But why Point Oven? I thought it was only used for working with Lightwave. I tried it before when we still used LW but it didn't work that great. We have few 3dsMax licenses around now, so I experimented FBX and Collada and again it seems many information were lost along the way.

[thiago]

well point oven because it comes with XSI out of the box... and you can bake a bunch of meshes in no time + the fact that the PO operator can be placed anywhere in the mesh construction stack... So you can leave an PO opeartor on top of everything else, even in a refmodel. Then you write a simple script that mute/unmute all other operators below.
You hit a button > bake everything > update the path in the PO operator > mute everything. Your scene go lightweight to the renderfarm and you sleep early.

PointOven because it work with PSC, MDD, LWO etc...
Crosswalk is not bad too...

theres also this amazing plugin by kai wolter: http://www.kai-wolter.com/resources/kp_pc_xsi
it works in maya/max I think (I didn't try this version yet)

Anyway, all solutions has it strong and weak points. And it's not going to be just one click.
But as everything pipeline wise.. you need to figure it out. :)

[lokm]

That's a very clever solution!

I can see myself having a hard time getting the pipeline to work properly but I am going to try!

thanks!

[lokm]

I just realized Animation Ploting, Point Oven, and Point Cache doesn't work with animations on parameters of Materials. I don't have expressions on those, but I can see someone else running into this problem doing some crazy simulation/FX one day.

[thiago]

I just realized Animation Ploting, Point Oven, and Point Cache doesn't work with animations on parameters of Materials. I don't have expressions on those, but I can see someone else running into this problem doing some crazy simulation/FX one day.

Not really, because you can plot parameters too ;)
The thing is, you need a good rig/good setup to work in this way.
For example, is really easy to do all this if you have properly set keyable parameters for example. Or if you have keysets.

A easy way to plot a parameters is in the animation editor just select the curves you want and hit curves>ressample and you are done.

In some cases (when you have good rig specially) you can just branch select the entire model and then plot adding as a clip to the mixer. And you are done.
Next time you need your scene back in a "normal stage" you just remove that plotted clip from the mixer and everything will be how it was supposed to be.

With some basic scripting you automate can automate all this of course

[lokm]

Ah... you were right! Somehow plotting parameters of material didn't work for some reason last time, I should've test more thoroughly.

Btw, KP_PointCacheTools seem to work really well! Except that it didn't seem to work properly for shapes modified by ShrinkWrap... so using the standard animation plotting functions and keeping the ShrinkWrap operator work better for me. I would guess PointOven would fail in that case too.