Maxwell Render

Hi

I wanted to ask if it is wise to do architektural animations with rhino/bongo. I just had a quick look at the tool and it seems to be able of handling everything I would need. And I guess it would work together with maxwell?
But how is the workflow? Are there any people here who can speak of experience whether it would be a good idea to have a deeper look into it, or would it be much wiser to learn another program?
Thanks for any opinions.

cheers, kami

It's easy to learn, lets you set up animations with the numerical precision you are use to and should work with Maxwell.
I believe one still needs a Script to render Animations with it - JD had to chime in.

But I find it heavily overpriced for what it can do.

No, since about plugin version 1.8.x it has been able to be used automatically.

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Next Limit Team

Hi JD

I played a bit around with rhino and bongo (/and maxwell). I was able to get what I wanted: a simple walkthrough with a focal distance variation.
I could also able to get bongo to export all .mxs for this animation. But I had to run a script off from mxcl to render these mxs. Is there any way to automate this?

The other weird thing I came across was, that when I enabled bongo, I wasn't able anymore to render just one image directly off rhino. When I tried to hit the Render Button on the maxwell toolbar I got the error "Unknown command: RenderScene".
Is there something wrong?

Thanks for the help
cheers, kami

I am not aware of any specific issues, but let me know which version of Rhino, Maxwell plugin, and Bongo you were using so I can check it out.

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Next Limit Team

It's rhino5x64 (1-Feb-2011), bongo 2.0 (beta for rhino5x64) and the newest plugin for rhino (2.5.11).
I played around a little: The error does not occur if you just launch bongo. But if you render out a "Bongo Render Animation" once, the maxwell button does not work anymore with the described error message.
If I type "Render" then an window opens "exporting frame", but I have to close it manually. And if I type "Maxwell_Render" it shows that the current frame is written as .mxs but it does not start to render.

I'm not sure if the bongo render animation is the correct way to get an animation, but since it does render out all frames correctly I would suppose the animation render (or just the single frame if needed) would start to render afterwards?
Thanks for any explanation ... kami

Well, I would have to download and test some stuff before I could tell you; the plugin is only built against Rhino 4.0 and Bongo 1.0, so both of the applications you're using are technically not-supported. After you 'render animation' in Bongo, you should get a dialog from the plugin asking whether you'd like to render the exported frames or not, so something's obviously wrong.

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Next Limit Team

I just downloaded bongo 2 (3/31/11) for both x86 and x64 Rhino 4(sr8), and the latest 5WIPs. I've been attempting to render animations and have been experiencing odd behaviour out of the Maxwell plugin (2.5.12.0).

Somehow, yesterday, once I created all the frames of the animation, Maxwell then kicked in and rendered the 'batch' as expected. I think I was using a trial of Bongo 1.7, as well as a regular Rhino animation. Then, I installed the new Bongo 2 beta, and Maxwell seems to no longer 'kick in' once the frames are exported.

Also, before I create/export the animation, fire works as expected (within rhino), but after I export the animation frames, Fire just says "Export Finished" on the status bar - with no image rendered.

Any ideas on what's up here? I'm trying to see if the workflow justifies my purchasing bongo to add the animation offering to my services.

Thanks!

As far as I am aware, the plugin works fine with Bongo 1.0 SR7. Regarding Bongo 2.0, sorry, but I will not attempt to make sure the plugin works with Bongo 2.0 until after it is actually released.

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Next Limit Team

Makes sense to me JD. Thanks.
Bongo support is on holidays for a few weeks, so I'll reinstall Bongo 1 to evaluate properly.
Cheers!