3dsmax Live Link to Network Computer

[LeePuznowski]

Is it possible to set the live link through 3dsmax to another computer? I would like to use our Render Server as the Host for Vantage but work on my local machine. Or at least render a sequence through the other machine with live link. This would avoid having to export a vrscene file out of max to render with Vantage on the server.

Exporting an animation of 400+ frames as a vrscene takes some time. The file size of the vrscene is very large at 30+ Gigs and then opening the vrscene in Vantage takes time. The whole process is not very well streamlined and ruins the simplicity of using Vantage. My goal is to use our render machine GPUs instead of my local workstation to final render.

[LeePuznowski]

The file size in this case is coming from several chaos scatter objects in the scene. It seems the scatter objects are being saved for every frame. They are not animated. I could probably save the scatter objects out separately as 1 frame and merge them into the animated scene in vantage, but is there an easier way to manage this?

[vladimir_krastev]

Hi, thanks for posting.

3dsmax Live Link to Network Computer

This is not possible for now.

the scatter objects are being saved for every frame. They are not animated

Do you have camera clipping enabled? If you do this will have the same effect as animated geometry.

[npg]

I think scattering has an option for camera clipping that can make it "animated".

Live link uses distributed rendering (DR) under the hood, so you could manually set V-Ray to connect to the correct IP and port (and not to render locally) and start IPR (not the Vantage button). But this will only work for interactive mode -- the animation script does not support this. Also the output would be viewable only on the machine that runs Vantage.

[LeePuznowski]

@ vladimir -> Camera clipping is not enabled.
npg -> I'll test that out with DR. I have the other machine opened through a Remote Desktop to view. Maybe this can eventually be added to the animation script? Although, if .vrscene addresses some of the other issues (ie. file size through scatter objects), that may be a viable option. The enormous scenes are also very difficult for Vantage to manage. Opening them takes a very long time and closing them freezes Vantage completely making me force quit through Windows task manager.

[Luma3d]

It would be interesting to see a screen grab of your model. One of the selling points of Vantage is that it can handle large assets.

[LeePuznowski]

The only issue here are the scatter objects that are being saved for every frame in the .vrscene. As mentioned, this can be avoided by saving them out separately for just one frame from 3dsmax and importing in Vantage. Just seems like an unnecessary step. There are various grass and foliage assets from Cosmos, so those should be well optimized for such situations. The total instance count should be somewhere in the 100.000.000 range I believe.

[npg]

Vantage has to release V-Ray scene data when you close the scene (or the app) and this takes a while with large scenes. There is a message in the status bar but we can't show progress. It should unfreeze eventually.