every Nth frame?

[super gnu]

As title, the ability to render, say every 20th frame is EXTREMELY important for estimating animation costs. It is used at the start of any heavy animation submission to a farm, to both get a handle on costs (far more accurate than rendering a small section of the sequence as it captures an "average" of the frame times..) and also to check for errors. the alternative would be to render a low res preview, but thats wasting credits.

i see no way to do this in chaos cloud.. maybe there is a trick ive not seen?

[stezza]

Wouldnt you change the animation to "Specific frames" then just put in "1,20,40,60,80,100"

[super gnu]

Wouldnt you change the animation to "Specific frames" then just put in "1,20,40,60,80,100"

does it work like that? i saw the submitter only had "scene animation range" or "frame range" with start and end frames... i assumed that meant you had a custom range, or "the whole timeline"

[stezza]

You're right, I just tried it with Specific frames and just rendered the first frame only.
I really thought this would have been supported, I'm sure Chaos will get this fixed.

[vladie]

Hi super gnu,

We have this option when you edit the animation upload settings through the Chaos Cloud Submit interface. It's called Frame Step. It works as you have described it. Also the frame range field in the Chaos Cloud Submit interface works as you expect it to work. In order to use these options you have to edit them when you are on the Chaos Cloud Submit screen. We are going to improve this and port these options to the V-Ray for 3ds Max Cloud Submit interface as well. Expect it soon.

Here you can read a bit more about these options (the article is about the Chaos Cloud Clone Job interface, but we'll fix that and add the info in the Cloud Submit article as well).

Thanks,
Vladie

[NorthVisualStudio]

Can the frames be adjusted when the file has uploaded?

[NorthVisualStudio]

I'm trying to upload a scene to render at every 75th frame to estimate render costs.
The issue is that when Submitting a job, there isn't any option to set these parameters but, if I Clone a render Job, there are options to set these parameters.
So, I have to upload a render job and set to not render, then Clone it to get the functionality I need but, I get the attached error.

I'm sure I'm doing it wrong, can anyone tell me whats happening?

[EDIT] On further inspection, I was exporting the vrscene file without animation and therefore as a Frame. If I export the vrscene as animation frame range, it exports the full animation but the file size and therefore upload times are massive.
[EDIT#2] I uploaded the vrscene as an animation and the option for every Nth frame was available! Solved.

[vladie]

NorthVisualStudio , thanks for the follow-up! Yes, you have to specify that the scene is an animation before submitting to Chaos Cloud or exporting it with the V-Ray Exporter. Then you will be able to use the Frame Step option.

Indeed when exported the animation .vrscene might get quite big. We are investigating several approaches how to improve this. So definitely we'll make improvements in this direction.

Thanks,
Vladie