Merge Irradiance Map with Backburner?

[Sascha Selent]

Hi everyone.

I just tried it and failed...

Is there a way to let the irradiance map viewer merge multiple maps through backburner?

I made a BAT to do this and this works fine, but I failed to do this via cmdjob and backburner.

The intention is the following:

1. let multiple machines pre-render parts of a long animations irradiance map via backburner
2. merge these multiple ir-maps automatically after finishing these pre-renders
3. automatically start the final pass immediately after merging the multiple ir-maps

If I have to merge these manually I have a time lack. My prepasses finished on saturday morning but I had to wait till monday to merge them when back in office. So I lost nearly two days of rendertime with a pending renderfarm.

If this step could be controlled by backburner I could set up a fully automatical dependencies-controlled renderchain.

Thank you.

Sascha

[scheinbarreal]

"If this step could be controlled by backburner I could set up a fully automatical dependencies-controlled renderchain."

this step and a lot more!

i tried and but failed, it works but definitely no stabil.

our Backburner always starts the dependent job when the main job is assined not completed.

[Sascha Selent]

this step and a lot more!
i tried and but failed, it works but definitely no stabil.
our Backburner always starts the dependent job when the main job is assined not completed.

Hi scheinbarreal.

Thanks for answering. How did you do it to send the merging to BB? If I know I can try it - if I find a working solution I´ll let you know.

What do you mean with "and a lot more!"

Thanks.

Sascha

[scheinbarreal]

here you are.

i submit the job to Backburner via "maxscript doscommand":

cmdjob.exe -jobname "20110725104500_Camera01_ir_post" -priority:40 -manager "wssg" -dependencies:"20110725104500_Camera01_ir" "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\ren derassets\test05_\20110725104500_Camera01_ir_post. bat"


and the batch contains something like:

imapviewer -load "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\_STP00000_20110725104500_Camera01 _00000.vrmap" -load "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\_STP00001_20110725104500_Camera01 _00000.vrmap" -save "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\20110725104500_Camera01_.vrmap" -nodisplay
imapviewer -load "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\20110725104500_Camera01_.vrmap" -load "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\_STP00002_20110725104500_Camera01 _00000.vrmap" -save "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\20110725104500_Camera01_.vrmap" -nodisplay
imapviewer -load "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\20110725104500_Camera01_.vrmap" -load "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\_STP00003_20110725104500_Camera01 _00000.vrmap" -save "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\20110725104500_Camera01_.vrmap" -nodisplay
imapviewer -load "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\20110725104500_Camera01_.vrmap" -load "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\_STP00004_20110725104500_Camera01 _00000.vrmap" -save "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\20110725104500_Camera01_.vrmap" -nodisplay
imapviewer -load "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\20110725104500_Camera01_.vrmap" -load "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\_STP00005_20110725104500_Camera01 _00000.vrmap" -save "\\WSSG\z$\Projekte\gantmax\test05\sceneassets\pho tometric\test05_\20110725104500_Camera01_.vrmap" -nodisplay

[Sascha Selent]

I´ll check it right now!

Thank you...

[Sascha Selent]

Okay, it works - just needed quotes around the manager name... - ts

Thank you.

I will test the workflow with a complex project and report the results.

Sascha

[scheinbarreal]

that´s one of the "a lot more"...

in the 3dsmax help http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/13/E...elp/index.html
there are no quote around the manager name... since the year 2007...

autodesk maybe thinks about the backburner: "never change a winning horse" or "never touch a running system"...
but in that case the backburner isnt a winning horse or running system...

[Sascha Selent]

Okay, then I´m not thaaat stupid.

Anyway, I´ll try to complete the workflow down till compositing with AE through BB AND maybe batch-processing the result with Pano2VR.

Report will follow.

[Sascha Selent]

Good Workflow for Batch-Rendering

Okay, here we go:

I found a good workflow to BB-batch-render anything that can be done with commandline. In my example (besides the standard-max-renderings) I do:

• VRay-IrradianceMap-Merge with IMapViewer via Backburner
• all AfterEffect-Compositings via Backburner
• Panorama-Generation with Pano2VR via Backburner
• Image-Transform with Pano2VR via Backburner

...everything with one Click and all dependencies work fine.

It´s a little messing around with *.bat-Files, Excel-Sheets and batch-commandlines, but if everything is prepared well hours of work can be done with a single click.

Definitely NOT helpful was the 3dsmax reference, because it provides absolutely WRONG information about cmdjob - at least with MY backburner. I installed the latest BB-version with Max 2011 (BB 2008 )and this has no argument "-taskfile" but a CaseSensitive "-taskList" (and several other - see cmdjob help). I don´t know if BB 2008 is the latest Version, but my Max 2011 didn´t install anything newer.

Another thing was that my *.bat-files didn´t really work with cmd, obviously because of encoding problems. Whenever I executed a regular text-bat-file some informations didn´t parse well through cmd, especially the %tp2-tokens or special characters like "ö". The only way was to write the commandline into a textfile and then copy-paste this directly into cmd. That worked well but was really uncomfortable, because I had to define dozens of commandlines in seperated textfiles and call them manually one by one. Really annoying. But I found a nice little tool to do this in one handy file: Batchrun by Outertech (http://www.outertech.com/en/create-batch-file) - (see screenshot). This is a really cool little tool within you can define as many commandlines as you like and execute them with one click. The nice thing is that it doesn´t mess around with encoding so the batches parse absolutely well into cmdjob. Another cool thing is that it´s files are ascii, so you can edit the batch-collection in a texteditor with search and replace.

So my workflow ist the following:

• batch-render from max what you need from max
• Prepare good taskLists
• Define a batch-collection in Batchrun WITH RIGHT ARGUMENTS for cmdjob - with ANY program that is capable to do commandline-processing (as I mentioned in my case with VRay Irradiance Map Viewer, AfterEffects and Pano2VR - but you can do A LOT MORE with this)
• If needed define the dependencies in the Batchrun-commandlines - these work well.
• Click once feel good.

The other screenshot shows my BackBurner-Queue - the marked entries are all done with Batchrun with a single click. You can imagine how long it would last to send them one by one...

I think I will have a closer look to commandline-rendering, especially directly according to Max - I think I can really speed up kicking renderjobs if I become really familiar with the commandline.

Best.

Sascha