First, let me admit that I know very little about 3DS Max but have been tasked with documenting a process for students to follow to prepare their 3DS Max jobs for command-line rendering on our in-house render farm (not backburner). I point this out as a “preemptive” apology for not knowing the proper terminology to use. In other words, please bear with me
Second, what I know about command-line rendering is that the project’s assets (textures, maps, etc.) must be relative to a project folder and that project folder must be accessible to all the render nodes in the farm.
Finally, what I do know about 3DS Max (version 2012) is that project assets can be located in a variety of locations (folders, hard drives, etc.).
So my question is- is there a recommended/preferred process or perhaps an existing MAXScript that “consolidates” all of a projects assets into one folder or into a project folder structure and updates those new file paths with relative rather than absolute paths?
I sincerely appreciate and welcome any and all feedback, tips, advice, recommendations on how I can/should proceeed.
Thank you very much!
Dan Embry
I’m afraid I don’t know much about command-line rendering, but I do know about collecting resources.
The easiest way to collect all maps, models, proxies, etc is to use this http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/mb-resource-collector resource collector. This script will copy all files to a folder, and will rename the paths too, but in your case I would ignore the paths part.
The safest way to ensure every map is seen is to put all the maps, models and proxies in the same folder as the .max file. The .max file will find all the resources, even if the paths aren’t mapped.
Dean
Between posting my initial comment and reading your post I stumbled upon the built-in “resource collector” utility within 3dsd Max 2012. However, the script you’ve recommended is more useful because it will “remap” the paths and make them relative (which is what’s needed for our centralized, command-line render farm (Muster 7, from Virtual Vertex).
In short- thank you Dean! This is exactly what I’ve been hoping to find.