alastairerrett

Ah ok, great, thanks for that. All sorted now.

Excellent, thanks so much. Mine is identical except it says 'Enter Subnet Mask' instead of Enter Manager Name or IP Address as yours does. Now you've explained that it'll work I can be confident that I can do what I need to. It's either just a different version and that's why it's not the same or it's because I don't have the Manager App installed on my network yet. I'm confident it'll work how I want now though so thanks for that.

Thanks that's helpful, the only thing I don't fully understand is how you connect to the Backburner manager from 3ds Max on a separate machine. For example. Say I'm on my workstation working on a scene in Max. I want to render out the scene, so I open up the Render Setup dialog box and set all my settings. The then click the dropdown arrow to the right of the render button and click 'Submit to network rendering'. Will this send the job to the backburner manager on the other workstation that's setup to run backburner manager? Currently when I press submit to network rendering it just opens the backburner manager on the workstation I'm currently on. This is probably because I haven't got it setup yet. In which case when setting it up how do I point 3ds Max on my workstation to the backburner manager on the other workstation? Thanks

Hi, I'm currently looking into setting up a render server for our small office. However I have a question about backburner that I need answering before I can move forward. The way I would like to setup backburner is that each user on the network can send a render job from their workstation to the backburner manager that's on a dedicated workstation, the backburner manager then sends the job to the render server which renders the job. I believe this is possible from reading the backburner user guide, however I have a couple of questions. Number 1 - How do you tell each users version of 3ds Max to point to backburner manager on the dedicated workstation rather than backburner manager on their own workstation? Number 2 - On the dedicated workstation setup for backburner manager do I need a licenced version of 3ds Max for it to work correctly. Or can I just have the backburner Manager installed and nothing else? Below is a diagram of how I'd like to setup the system in case my description wasn't clear enough. Thanks Alastair

Hi thanks George that looks great. I've now managed to do this using two hose objects 'bound to object pivots' for the crane wires. I'm going to have a go at reproducing yours as well so I have two methods and I'll see which one works best and is easiest to setup.

Hi Guys, I've created a very simple crane rig in Max so you can all see the problem I'm having more clearly. As the crane boom is rotated down or the base rotated the linked xform stops working and the wires go off at an odd angle. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for the help so far Mechanical Linking-Crane Mockup.zip

Hi George, thanks for that, resetting the pivot point sorted the problem.

Hi, I have an object I'm trying to link to a helper object. The pivot points of both objects are aligned but when I try to link the two objects suddenly one of the moves off to the side. Does any one know why this happens and how to fix it? Thanks

Hi, Yeah I tried a linked xform and I could get it to extend the crane wires but then when I move the boom of the crane the wires break off from the crane. I think it's to do with the pivot point but I can't sort it at the moment and I don't see why adding the linked xform would change where it pivots from when it was working fine before adding the linked xform

Thanks for the reply. I wanted to get it so I didn't have to go in and edit the vertices every time it moved. Your animations look great though

Hi Everyone I have a crane I'm trying to rig that I need some help with. I need to rig the crane so that as I lower the hook of the crane the wires attached to the hook extend. I tried doing it with a LinkedXform but although I got the wires to extend as I lower the hook, ass soon as I rotated the boom of the crane the wires went off in a strange direction. Does anyone know how to do this? Thanks