The RANCH RenderFarm User Guide Part II the RANCH for Lightwave 3D

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The RANCH RenderFarm User Guide Part II the RANCH for Lightwave 3D www.ranchcomputing.

1 The RANCH RenderFarm User Guide Part II the RANCH for Lightwave 3D October 23, 2015 Welcome to the RANCH automated rendering service, the super-powerful - and affordable - supercomputer for all your Lightwave projects! This document contains information specific to the use of Lightwave 3D on the RANCH. Before reading it, we highly recommend you read Part I first - the General Guide - which includes everything not specifically related to Lightwave 3D. Supported versions - Lightwave , 11.5, 10.1 and 9.6 (64-bit and 32-bit). - The FPrime engine is supported with Lightwave 9.6 only (64-bit and 32-bit). - Integrated Lightwave + Vue xstream renders are supported in 64-bit mode only. 1

2 1) Important information about scene preparation It is VERY important that you read this section carefully before submitting a scene. It will help you avoid common mistakes. Please verify before sending the scene that you have saved it with all the correct parameters. It is your responsibility to provide the scene with every parameter correctly set. The scene will be rendered exactly as you send it. If you use your own plug-ins / scripts / MDD / other files, etc., do not forget to include them in your project (see section #2). Do not use accentuated / non-alphanumeric characters, spaces, apostrophes and dots in the filenames of your project (scene, textures, objects, etc.). To avoid any possible parsing problems on the RANCH Runner, please use only letters and numbers. You can also use the _ sign (underscore) to replace spaces. When you submit a high resolution still image as your project, please make sure that both X and Y resolutions are multiples of 16 pixels. It is essential for our high-speed adaptive tiling algorithm to work. If this is not the case, the project will be rejected. Do not forget to check the Save RGB option in your Lightwave scene (Render Globals/Output) before you save it. The RANCH always output high resolution still image projects in.png format (if another output format is specified in the scene, it will be ignored). This format offers the best compromise between quality and size, with a highly efficient lossless compression algorithm. You can of course convert the image afterwards in another format with your favorite image editor. Note that this is only for still images: when rendering animations, the image format specified in the scene will always be used. Please always specify individual frames rendering for animations output (.bmp,.tga,.rla, etc.). We cannot directly render an animation to a video file format like.avi,.mov,.wmv due to multiple differences between video formats, codecs, platforms, 64-bit incompatibilities, etc. In any case it is always best to render individual frames, for a lot of reasons: more security, better quality, ability to do compositing, ability to try different compression methods afterward with your video editing software, etc. When you submit a still image project, please be aware that some post-processing plugins needs the complete image to work on (for instance image processing plugins such as glow, etc). As the full resolution image is cut into many tiles during the render, the plugin would process each tile as the whole image, and discontinuities would appear in the final render. It is safer to leave such post-processing effects to your image / video editor when the render is finished. If you use radiosity in your projects, we highly recommend you include a radiosity cache file pre-rendered on your system (see section #2) to avoid discontinuities in still images or flickering in animations. 2

3 The RANCH cannot support camera switches in the middle of an animation (due to lwsn.exe limitations). If you have a project which uses camera switches, cut it in several sequences, each with its own camera, before sending the files to the RANCH. Do not specify a region area to render, as it will not be taken into account. The RANCH always renders at the full resolution specified in the Submit project form, and uses its own integrated algorithm to subdivide a high resolution still image into numerous tiles to optimize render times. The RANCH does not support the Arbitrary Range Type function of Lightwave 3D. So if you want to render, say, frames 1 to 100 and frames 300 to 400 of the same scene, you will have to submit two projects (the same project, but with different frame ranges, the first with 1-100, the second with ). Please always use relative paths (Objects/MyObject.lwo) instead of absolute paths (C :Project1/Objects/MyObjetc.lwo) for objects and textures in your scenes. Absolute paths are tied to your system, when relative paths are universal. The RANCH will be able to find your objects and textures and render your scene correctly only when they are referenced by relative paths. For the same reasons, make sure that the.lwo objects used in your project also reference their textures by their relative paths (for instance Images/MyTexture and NOT <full path>/images/mytexture). If you use e-on software Vue xstream in your Lightwave projects, you must embed the Vue scene in the Lightwave scene before sending your project to the RANCH. To do so, please verify that you have checked the 'Incorporate Vue scene in Lightwave scene file' square in the Vue xstream options, before saving your scene. 3

2) Scene preparation before sending the project to the RANCH As the RANCH is entirely automated, you need to send your scene in a project archive which contains all the files needed for your scene to

4 2) Scene preparation before sending the project to the RANCH As the RANCH is entirely automated, you need to send your scene in a project archive which contains all the files needed for your scene to be rendered correctly. To do this, follow the steps below: 1) First you need to export the main elements of your scene in a project directory, with the help of Lightwave. So, create a new directory and give it the name of your project. In our example we will call it MyScene, but of course you can give it the name you want. Then load your scene in Lightwave 3D Layout, and select the menu option File / Package Scene. In the example below the project will be saved in the C:\Lightwave\Content directory (we use this path on the RANCH). 2) Click OK to confirm. Lightwave will then save all the objects and textures used in your scene, along with the scene itself, in your project directory. When this is done, you will find several sub-directories in your project directory. 4

5 3) If your scene needs other files than those previously gathered by the Content Manager (these other files can be plug-ins, MDD files, etc.), copy them directly to the root of your project directory. For instance, if you wanted to send to the RANCH the project water simulation.lws (found in the Lightwave Content Scenes\Dynamics\Water Simulation dir), you would have to copy the essential water.mdd file (it can be found in MDD\Water Simulation) to the root of your project directory, which would then look like this: If your scene uses some freeware external plug-ins (.p,.ls,.lsc files), include them exactly like in the.mdd example above. But - very important - you must also include your plugin configuration file (LWEXT9.CFG for LW bit, LWEXT10-64.CFG for LW bit, LWEXT CFG for Lightwave , etc.). This is the only way for the automated RANCH to know how to use your plugin correctly. The root of your project directory could then look like this: - If you do not include the correct LWEXT*.CFG file and the archive contains at least one external plugin, the project will be rejected. - Note that you do not have to include the plugin configuration file if your project does not use any external plugin. - If your Lightwave version is version 8, you will have to rename your LWEXT8.CFG file (for instance) in LWEXT9.CFG before sending it. 4) If you are using a Radiosity Cache file, make sure that the name of the cache directory in your project archive is "radiosity" from Lightwave 10 onward, or "radiositycache" for Lightwave 9.6. Examples: Lightwave 10 Lightwave 9.6 5) You can now use RANCHpacker to convert your Lightwave project to a ready to render project archive. RANCHpacker will compress the files into a RANCH for Lightwave project archive (.vul) that you can directly upload to the RANCH. 5

Appendix A: frame preview for animations The RANCH offers you a very handy feature for checking visually your animation project when it is being rendered.

6 Appendix A: frame preview for animations The RANCH offers you a very handy feature for checking visually your animation project when it is being rendered. It displays 256-pixel wide thumbnails of a large sample of rendered frames on a web page specific to your inprogress project. To access this page, you just have to click on the button which appears when your project is being rendered (and of course if there is something to preview: if each frame of your animation takes 30 minutes to render, obviously there will be nothing to see during the first 30 minutes :) Below is an example of what you will be able to see when you click on Preview (the preview image is always around 1900 pixels wide, its height depends on the number of thumbnails). Notes: - At the end of the render, the preview image is also copied in your project's directory. - The preview function may not work with some graphics formats; in that case it will display black frames (or nothing at all). That does _not_ mean that your project has a problem of course. You can still check its progress in % in the queue. 6

The RANCH RenderFarm User Guide Part II the RANCH for TERRAGEN

The RANCH RenderFarm User Guide Part II the RANCH for TERRAGEN www.ranchcomputing.com 14-06-01 June 1, 2014 Welcome to the RANCH automated rendering service, the super-powerful - and affordable - supercomputer