Batch Rendering questions (lightly off topic)

Mechadus

Ive been given a project at the day job that's driving me ever so slightly [more] nuts.... Ive done some basic research and asked on some rendering forums, but haven't got any useful info, so I figured I would ask the collective wisdom of the PC Community... This is more a rendering question, but I can see applications where it could apply to the game industry also.

So here is the story and what I'm trying to do.....

We are making a website that has a 3d shirt with multiple collar, cuff and pocket styles, as well as the clients entire fabric inventory. For each of the cuffs, collars, pockets and shirts I have to render 1 image for each fabric. Its a very easy process, but....

(6 collars + 3 cuffs + 2 pockets + 1 shirt base) * 196 fabrics = 2352 images I have to render..

So I have to manually apply the proper material, choose output path/name and render 2352 times. This makes me sad.

The kicker is, Im stuck using MAX 8.0. Not 2008... eight point zero. I cant upgrade because to quote my boss "I already bought it once, why should I buy the same program twice?".. and I cant just do this from home because I'm not allowed to take any part of this job out of the office (thanks lawyers!!) so I cant use the fancy features in the newer versions of max. This also makes me sad.

Does anybody have any ideas about scripts, plugins or anything that could help me automate the process of applying materials and rendering using max 8?

sorry if this is a bit lengthy and confusing, but Ive been at it for 14 hours and my brain is turning to mush. Thanks for any ideas!

-N

Mark Dygert

Scene states and the batch render dialog would avoid you having to set it all up each time you want to render.

You set up the scene right click and choose "save scene state" highlight the things you want it to save, give it a name and click save.

Then in Rendering > Batch Render you create an entry for each render setting the output path and scene state.

I suggest creating a multi sub-object with 196 materials in it, then render out each object separately 196 times with each material applied. It shouldn't be too hard to write a script that applies each material, saves a scene state, and creates a batch render entry that contains the correct scene state.

If you're working with the batch render you probably want to run this script, it adds some nice functionality to batch render. Like being able to highlight multiple entries and change their properties. It might make it easy enough that you don't actually need to script anything.

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/batch-render-assistant

Mechadus

Hey Vig-

Thanks for the reply. I had forgotten all about scene states, but Ill look into that to see if it can save any time. That script looks really handy, but it doesnt work with max8... bummer. The multi-sub idea is really interesting tho - Im going to experiment a bit and see if I can figure something out that way. I appreciate the ideas tho - everything is helpful at this point

Piflik

What I would do is make an animated material and then render a sequence...just rename the fabric-textures accordingly and you can load them as a sequence into a Bitmap Map.

Mechadus

Thats a fine idea also... I think it would be a bit less flexible than some of the other options, but definitely see how that could work, and its more within my current realm of knowledge. Thanks!