Hello, I had a short animation crash over a network. Vue5inf is not aware and didn't ask to put the tmp files together. In fact that feature seems to be gone. It was in vue4. Is there anything I can do with tmp files to view or use them? I did read on this forum in 2002 that atz3 had the same question. Has anything changed?

Message edited on: 04/02/2005 21:37

I'm considering upgrade and this is one of the main things I hope is indeed healed.The network render really ought to save out each frame, fully saved, as it finished renders. That would be a better solution than 'improved ability to recover tmp on network render crash." ::::: Opera :::::

It seems that we are worse off because now vue5inf is not even aware of the tmp files after a crash. I'm left guessing as to what happened in this version of vue when addressing this old problem. Thanks for replying.

Message edited on: 04/02/2005 23:32

I haven't tried this trick with animation tmp files but the Vue cache of texture files should be in in your Windows/Documents and Setting/[Username]/temp folder (assuming you're using a PC). I've used this to retrieve the alpha maps for Vue's plants.

lanaloe, I am going to write to E-On directly about this later today. Will post back. Did you write to them? ::::: Opera :::::

I agree, it should work. But what you always could do (and should) is to render animations to an image sequence (jpg for example). And put those together to a movie with another application. If you do so you have all images that are rendered already when a crash happens - by whatever reason. Power down or bug.

That is always how I render animations wabe, in Poser for instance. [By the way, never to jpg, that is a lossy compression, always to PNG or TIFF, non-lossy] But I think the problem is worse than you realize. From what I have been lead to believe, if you are rendering to images with the Vue Renderfarm it does not actually fully save each individual frame out to a directory as it goes along...it creates temporary files that -- at the end of the entire run -- turn INTO individual frames. The problem is...if there is a crash (and therefore the render stops, leaving a bunch of temps and not actual finished frames) VUE is supposed to be able to be aware of the temps on restart and recover. In the past, that has not always worked, and the individual frames of full renders have been lost. This is really bad. lanaloe77 is reporting that now VUE apparently DOES NOT EVEN SEE the temps at all after restart after a crash. This is really REALLY bad. ::::: Opera :::::

Hi again. I will report it to e-on as you suggested. Wabe I'll try the jpg suggestion but I have one question: Will the quality of an uncompressed avi be better than a jpg sequence that is put together as an uncompressed avi or will it be equal? Thanks everybody.

Ok, first we learned to use png or tif instead of jpg. If you use avi for example you render into one big file - with a crash the whole sequence is lost. If you do it into separate single png's or tif's you only lose the last image when a crash happens, the rest is still save and saved on your disk. You don't have to start the whole thing again therefore.

Thanks for the insight :-}

After 6 hours, Vue Infinite crashed, leaving behind 3,390 tmp files. This is what e-onsoftware's tech support said:

I don't think there is a way to recover these frames, but in the HyperVue Network Rendering Manager, you can check the option 'Generate temporary frame files', and the frames will be written in a readable format along with the .tmp files.

well, that is an 'interesting' response, and can anyone verify if this indeed works. And are those frames REALLY safe if the full render crashes?

one wonders what "readable format" means? what format?

and what is the purpose of the .tmp files if 'readable format frames are being rendered?"

to be full professional, the program has to give control over the individual frames it renders as it goes along. IMO This should be not be a casual oh-by-the-way 'thrown in' but rather the primary goal of render, network or not: Individual fully lossless frame files, sequentially numbered, with choice by the user.

Does the option indicated give a list of formats? PNG? TIFF? various quality levels of JPG? Many people want PNG and TIFF because of the alpha channel. You sometimes might also want low-level jpg for a quicker test render.

::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 04/20/2005 13:09

interesting points, well at least now I know what that check box is for. Thank you, I'll give it a try.