AVI Material not rendering

[tONy31]

Hi there,

I've tried to search low and high for any literature on this, but can't seem to find anything.

Essentially I am trying to animate a tv with a screen that shows a avi movie. In max I used to import the .avi into to a vray light material bitmap slot, this all works fine on my workstation and renders, but when i send the scene across my farm each render node does not pic up the avi movie ???

Has anybody got any info on how to resolve this

i have checked all nodes can play the avi so its not a codec problem and all maps are correctly located...using 64bit max 2011....vray sp2

Thanks

Tony

[ior=0]

Might be best to covert the avi in a png sequence and share those to the render nodes, that way they will know which frame of the TV movie to render a specific frame in your animation. They will then not all be trying to access different parts of the same avi at the same time.

[tONy31]

yeah strange thing is i have done this before and it worked fine !

[super gnu]

its definitely recommended to stay away from all types of monolithic video file formats when doing anything involving network rendering. avi's particularly dont like being accessed multiple times simultaneously by different machines at the same time, although quicktimes also have this problem.

im not sure how you got it to work last time, maybe you were just lucky.. however id strongly reccomend you avoid em like the plague. converting to a png (or jpg is better actually.. png's have their own issues with backburner - "png library internal error" message familiar?) sequence is dead easy in max.. just open the avi in ram player, and hit the save button. choose a new folder, and choose a name and .jpg as the file type. it will sit there apparently not doing anything for a while, then suddenly youll find a folder of sequentially numbered images to use, and these play absolutely fine with backburner.

[tONy31]

its a fixed avi tho from youtube ! i dont have the option of using jpegs.....my workstation does not have a problem with it at all but my farm has ! i just dont get it has worked for me before....but then that was on a different version of max/vray and bb..

[super gnu]

what do you mean a "fixed avi from youtube"? i cant think of any reason why you couldnt convert it to a jpeg sequence.. as detailed above its rediculously easy...

[tONy31]

ok bud doing that now...cheers i will let you know

[tONy31]

so now i have the jpegs how do i go about applying them to the scene ?

[tONy31]

ok think i have found out how to do it lol

[super gnu]

you just open the material that has the avi as a texture, and choose the first jpeg in the list instead.. make sure you have "sequence" ticked at the bottom of the load dialogue..and thats it.

[tONy31]

yeah i sused it thanks bud trying it now !!