The men who stare at buckets

[pg1]

At the moment I am thinking of buying a second machine to just preview on as I'm sick of losing so much time staring at buckets.
I want to be able to hit preview and still work at the same time.
Surely it should be possible to set affinity on render and while your previewing to be able to continue working? setting up mat ids elements etc.
This would really change my working day.

[glorybound]

That's probably a good use of MAX's Backburner.

At the moment I am thinking of buying a second machine to just preview on as I'm sick of losing so much time staring at buckets.
I want to be able to hit preview and still work at the same time.
Surely it should be possible to set affinity on render and while your previewing to be able to continue working? setting up mat ids elements etc.
This would really change my working day.

[pg1]

Hey Glorybound, yes the piece of crap that is backburner, 10 years of pain. sorting a column makes it crash, go Deadline and never look back

Network rendering is great but given the size of scenes these days I don't think its feasible to submit network renders and the 5 minutes it takes to submit and load on a farm machine to render a 5 minute preview.

I am looking into buying a new workstation and am considering viable solutions to keep working while continually doing typically short 1-10 minute renders.

Currently my typical work flow is to have 2 shots open most of the time when I render on one I am trying to work in another but this is a very fragmented way to work and kills creativity.

I seem to remember being able to move around in Maya while rendering, is it a 3dsmax problem?

[glorybound]

I am not sure Autodesk would say it was a problem, they would say Backburner. Now, having said that, I don't use Backburner.

Hey Glorybound, yes the piece of crap that is backburner, 10 years of pain. sorting a column makes it crash, go Deadline and never look back

Network rendering is great but given the size of scenes these days I don't think its feasible to submit network renders and the 5 minutes it takes to submit and load on a farm machine to render a 5 minute preview.

I am looking into buying a new workstation and am considering viable solutions to keep working while continually doing typically short 1-10 minute renders.

Currently my typical work flow is to have 2 shots open most of the time when I render on one I am trying to work in another but this is a very fragmented way to work and kills creativity.

I seem to remember being able to move around in Maya while rendering, is it a 3dsmax problem?

[vlado]

You could also write a short MaxScript to save your scene and fire up 3dsmaxcmd.exe to render it outside of your normal 3ds Max session.

Best regards,
Vlado

[voltron7]

I use BB, and it is okay, but even in low-thread priority, you would still have to deal with some slowdown, especially on larger/heavy scenes.
For me, BB works nicely for sending a slew to render while I sleep
Don't want to jinx myself, but BB seems stable for me since around 2012...

[Neilg]

yeah i've not had a single problem with backburner for years. I remember when it used to die a couple of times a week for no reason but newer versions are very stable

[pg1]

I haven't used it over the past 3 years. Been freelancing for the past few weeks and they use backburner. If I try go to a job and try and sort any of the columns e.g. by render time it instantly crashes and does this whenever I try and sort by any useful information to debug renders. I dont remember it being this bad maybe its just this company?

Yep love the overnight render, working while I sleep just trying to avoid falling asleep at my desk

Maxscript to 3dsmaxcmd.exe, thanks Vlado that s a good idea, will have to look into that when I get some spare time.

[Neilg]

I think something is SERIOUSLY wrong with their backburner install or server...

[pg1]

Lots of things seem a bit off at this job, mostly network related, only here until the end of the next week so will have to just grin and bear it the joys of freelancing.


What set me off on this train of thought was using the auto save option in the VFB. It shows you how long each test render takes.
Adding up the days short test renders amounts to a lot of time unable to work in a scene.

Really love the idea that every time I press preview it renders on a separate part of my cpu or on a somehow dual mirrored second machine so that I can keep working.

Haven't used it in a while but RT kinda allows this. Hopefully it is more and more useful as time goes on.