Maxwell Render

Hi, this is my first post in this forum. So, hello everybody

Want to start with two small questions:

1. Where can I fast and easy see which SL level an mxi file has reached? (What would be an elegant solution if you have 650 frames with different SL levels)

2. If I have a sequence of rendered .mxi´s, and some of those files have reached SL 16, some have reached SL 12 and some SL 10. What is the best way to render this sequence over the network to make sure every file is at least SL 16?

Have tried setting the desired SL to 16, but the "Network Job Wizard" will not resume the render since some of the files already have reached SL 16. In my case I had to set the SL to 17, but it would be nice if the "network job wizard" would just "jump" over the files that is finished and focus on the other ones.

3. I know, I said two. But this is a really small one If I want to render selected frames in a sequence, what would be the correct formatting? In the manual I read i.e 0-13;56-98;120-140 But this does not work for me. I input those numbers in the "frames" field in the Add Network Job Wizard.

Best Regards,
Kevron

If this is for animation work, a series of frames generated at different SL's may not provide a very good output. I'm guessing there will be a lot of jumping noise and artifacts. I'll try to answer your questions as best I can, but there may be better ways. If so, someone will chime in.

1) Short of opening up each MXI, I don't believe there is a quick way to check a series of individual SL's.

2) It sounds as if all of your renders reached a time limit and stopped as opposed to their required SL. In the future, set the time to something unreachable like 9999 minutes per frame, with an SL limit set to what you need (ie. 17). This way it'll reach the SL number, stop and move onto the next frame before the time runs out, ensuring all the frames reach the same level.

3) There may be a much better way of doing this, but I remember when I had 6 frames in an animation that I needed to re-render. I simply took those 6 frames, re-numbered them as "[animation name]001.mxs", "[animation name]002.mxs", "[animation name]003.mxs"... added them to the network as 1-6 and rendered them seperately. When they were done I renamed them back placed them back in with the others. I was lucky enough to only have 6 frames to re-do, however. If you had a few hundred it may not be a good solution.

Good luck!

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Thanks Rob for your thoughts, much appreciated.

My renders did not reach their time limit, it was my fault. I am working progressive, so first to SL 5, then SL 10 and so on.. But on the last render to SL 16, something made the network crash and I had to submit the job again to the network. So, I ended up with a few hundred frames with SL 16 and the rest with SL 14.

I could just look for which of the files that got written last to the disk, I guess that could show me the last rendered frame with SL 16.

I really like maxwell render, it's a nice piece of software to know.

Cheers,
Kevron