cloudbreak

Absolutely amazing thanks Morne - very much appreciated. I'll be using this method from now on. Thanks!

Hello everyone, I'm under an immense animation deadline and cannot figure out how to make the standard 3ds max populate people render as flat white, preferably semi-transparent. Does anyone know how to do this? I get the right effect using vraymtlwrapper but I can't change it from black to white or add any transparency? If I just add refraction to the standard vray material then you see through the person but you see they're internals as well, making them look like they're made out of glass. I just want a flat, 2d white matte look to them. Any ideas - I'm desperate! thanks Jonty

Cheers for the reply Matt. Just wanted to know if there was any way of transferring jobs that have already been submitted if the PC goes down or needs a reboot etc. I am at the moment running jobs 24/7 yes as the job I'm currently on requires about 20,000 frames to be rendered so they are all on continuously. A few of them are only Dell precision desktops though which aren't really supposed to be on for weeks on end so ideally I'd switch one or two off overnight just to cool down etc. No worries - I just wondered if anyone had successfully done it. Cheers

Hi all - great forums. Just wondering if anyone knows if it's possible to transfer a backburner job from one manager to another? I have a small render farm setup and would like to give each machine a break - ideally turning one off a night rather than them all being on 24/7 but obviously the one which is acting as the manager can't go offline otherwise all the render jobs will stop. I know I could just start a manager on another machine and send the job to that one but I have lots queued up already and don't want to delete tham and then have to set them all back up in Max and resubmit them to another manager. Not sure it's possible but if anyone knows otherwise I'd love to know. Cheers Jonty

Great thanks Scott - good advice.

Ah I see what you mean Nicolai - however I've got more buildings which I'm fading in and out and I'm not sure I've got time to remodel. Also even with interior faces deleted, you'd still see for example the back wall through the front one. I'm trying to avoid that, like in photoshop when you have a final rendered imaged and bring the trasparency from 0 to 100, you don't see through the object to rear walls etc, you just see a transparent version of the fully opaque render. See what I mean? I think what I'll have to do, although I was trying to avoid it, is render the animation twice, once with the building hidden and again with the building fully visible and go from one to the other in Premiere. Bit of a pain as it means twice the render time so if anyone's got any other alternatives I'd love to hear them. Cheers.

Thanks very much for the quick response Nicolai but the same model is needed for showing interior shots in a later animation so remodelling probably isn't a viable option. Thanks anyway - much appreciated.

Hi all - I've tried to search for this with no luck so apologies if I've missed the solution somewhere else. I'm rendering a simple animation in vRay (no GI) with a building fading in from 0% visible to 100%. See attached (chapel_01.jpg) for how it looks mid animation. What I really need though is slightly tricky to explain. I need to not see the hidden geometry when it's fading in. I'm just changing the object's visibility in object properties at keyframes so at the moment it's 'ghosting' in whereas I need to not be able to see geometry behind. I've mocked up what I need in photoshop (chapel_02.jpg) and if the camera was static then I'd just compile in post but the camera has movement so I can't. Any ideas? Any help very gratefully received. Thanks. Jonty.