Urgent help required: max self illumination bug workaround

[TJMGoodwin]

Hi All,

I've got an urgent deadline and have encountered a problem.

Animating the self illumination on A&D materials doesn't render during animation. It's an official bug but I didn't realise this until it was too late. Rendering individual frames works, the time slider shows the change but as soon as you render the sequence it stops working.

I have a scene with alot of self illuminating objects that vary illumination during time. I can render a single frame and it looks great. Render the sequence and the self ill. doesn't work. So I either have to render each frame individually and save or redo my entire animation and work around this ( not sure how I'm going to do that yet).

I'm a poor scripter (and am tired and not thinking straight)so am asking for help as it will probably take me longer scripting than it will rendering and saving each frame.

To cut a long story short, I'm after a script that:

renders the current single frame
saves it with name + frame number
increments the frame count
renders the current single frame
saves it with name + frame number etc

between a start and end frame count.

Does anyone know a script that does something similar that I can hack apart? or are capable enough to put one together in a few minutes . Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Thank you.

El-d



PS Using max 2008.

[Anonymous]

Here is the basic framework:

--Change the Path and Extension as needed.
--The current viewport will be rendered with the current settings.

for i = 0 to animationRange.end do
    (
        render frame:i vfb:off progressbar:true \
        outputfile:("c:/renderSequence/sequence_" + (i as string) + "_.jpg")
    )

Extend it as needed. Do an Index search in the MAXscript help file for "render()" and you'll get all of the other optional bells and whistles to help extend it.

[TJMGoodwin]

Thank you very much.

I feel much better after a nights sleep and waking to find the exact response that would stop me having a long night ahead of me. I'm sure it will happen anyway but this takes a load of my mind.
Thanks.

El-d

[Anonymous]

Just an idea (not tested) - try post-render script, i.e. save to .ms file next line:

sliderTime += 1

1. Now in renderer setup / Common tab / Scripts / Post-Render - shoose your saved .ms file.
2. Make sure your time slider is on the beginning of your time range (0f for example)
3. Make some short interval test, to say from 0f to 10f
4. Check saved sequence files.

Test and say if helps.

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much.

You're welcome.