my tests of prman with Massive did not work

[dhernand]

When my tests of prman with Massive did not work, Gavin and I sat down together to investigate:

Massive rendering. Currently prman creates the sim and rib files, but does not create a bat (batch) file to execute the render on Windows 7. When we tried creating a bat file by hand it did not produce a tif file. We tried the same procedure on Linux - again no bat file and the prman command did not work.

In addition, the error of cannot compile massive.fs continues on Linux and it still thinks we are using Fedora 8. Odd.

Also, when using Massive on Windows, when selecting render passes it often freezes. Gavin also reproduced this error and suspects it may have to do with the fact that massive is 32bit being run on 64bit ...

The preview prman also needs to be tested.

[guoxie20]

Sometimes Massive can't create batch file, so we need to create it manually.
like:
prman H:/renderMan/massive_rib/default0001.rib
prman H:/renderMan/massive_rib/default0002.rib
prman H:/renderMan/massive_rib/default0003.rib
.......

and save it as a .bat file, then Renderman can render it, and the output images are in the same directory with ribs.
like :
H:/renderMan/massive_rib/default0001.tiff

[guoxie20]

Here is another solution. Murat wrote a script in Windows.



"Here is the batch render script for windows. Just make sure that the rib files were generated in windows as well.
It is very simple to use. You can either copy this file to the folder where your render ribs are located and run it, or you can open up a command prompt and type in "render.bat driveletter:/path/to/the/folder/where/ribs/are/".
If you use the second method, render.bat does not need to be in the same folder or drive as the render ribs.
I am working on the linux version.
Murat"

[guoxie20]

Here is the solution from Massive help document:
The render script
Massive automatically creates a render script when generating render files from the Sim dialog or from the command line. The render script is saved as render_script.sh in the current directory. It can be run from the shell to start a render job of the newly generated render files. The render script will execute the renders that were selected in the RENDERS section of the Sim dialog at the time of writing out the render files. So it's important to make sure that any required shadow map renders are also selected.

Please note that generating more render files from the Sim dialog or command line will create a new render_script.sh, overwriting the old one.

Here is a typical render_script.sh generated by Massive:

#!/bin/csh -f
set f = 1
while ($f <= 40)
echo $f
render `printf "/project/shot/rib/myrender.%04d.rib" $f`
@ f++
end
echo "Render complete"

The render script can be easily be modified. Here is an example showing how the script could accept arguments for start frame and end frame:

render_script.sh <start frame> <end frame>

...by adjusting the script like this:

#!/bin/csh -f
set f = $1
while ($f <= $2)
echo $f
render `printf "/project/shot/rib/myrender.%04d.rib" $f`
@ f++
end
echo "Render complete"

This new script you could then be used for network rendering by running different frame ranges on different render-farm machines. For example:

* machine1 run render_script.sh 1 20
* machine2 run render_script.sh 21 40

Of course, this assumes the use of a network file server and having all machines able to access the same file using the same path.