I’m writing a viewport preview tool.
I have everything working to some extent, but I feel like I need more control over how the images are saved. At the moment I’m just grabbing the viewport, using pasteBitmap to crop to desired aspect, rendermap to resize and then building a bitmap with many frames to save as an avi and also saving out each seperate image as either jpg, tga or png. I seem to have no way to set what type of avi codec or options for compression etc. in the single image files. I’m thinking I likely have to look into converting it to a dotnet bitmap and saving it from there. I also thought that if I’m already converting to a dotnet bitmap, that there may be better (faster) image cropping and scaling tools in dotNet too?
Can anyone share experiences? I’ve been searching and reading posts and help files for days on this stuff and I’m not any closer to understanding…
Cheers,
Cg.
i’m 100% sure that LO have eaten all of it been making his VFB tool. cry him for help
if you are intending to save to sequence anyway, why not just convert your sequence to avi using a free converter tool like ffmpeg?
Hey Gravey, thanks for the suggestion. I was thinking of using something along those lines as a last resort. If I do end up going that way, I’ll definitely check out ffmpeg. This tool is for quite a few people, so machines are always being swapped around and having clean installs, so avoiding having to add extra programs into the mix is definitely preferred. I know I can use an absolute-path in the script for ffmpeg somewhere on the network, but I like to try to keep things as self-contained as possible with the least amount of complexity and ongoing maintenance. Plus I’d still have to get around having no options when saving the image sequence too. So If I can get around that, I was thinking it might work for both stills and avi.
Cheers,
Cg.
My conclusions from my experience with this issue:
- There is absolutely no way to define AVI save settings in 3dsmax.
- Moving to dotnet with alpha is slow, because it goes through the hard drive. If you don’t need alpha or more than 8bpp, and have a way of configuring an AVI using dotnet (I sure don’t), you might as well do your cropping and resizing in dotnet.
if this truely is the case then directly accessing avi.cfg in
\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Autodesk\3dsMax\<max version>\enu\plugcfg
maybe an option. May I suggest a good hex editor and a lot of patience.
oh and full disclosure of the file format on here when you are finished would be nice too
i have ffmpeg running from the network with no troubles at all. you can even send a custom command line job to backburner to have a render node do your conversion (but it’s fast enough to do locally if you dont want to wait)
you are talking about saving jpg, tga and png. are the jpegio, tgaio and pngio interfaces not working for you?
I agree with Gravey and would do it using the FFmpeg. It’s a very nice thing. It’s limited by its license for commercial use but… in short… see the license
Lo: Thanks for sharing
I’ve just figured out that if you use a getBitmapSaveFileName, you can set the file output settings that way and it will respect the filetype settings you assign in there when you save next time. I’m still doing all my naming and pathing automatically. Just setting the filetype and filetype options from the file browser. It’s not as super tidy as I’d like, but it’s working quite well. Plus I get all the other filetypes for free
claude666:
Hehe. I’m not sure I’d have the patience to try to figure anything out like that. Entertaining suggestion though. I promise if I do ever figure it out like that, you’ll be the first to know. I just wouldn’t hold your breath.
Gravey:
With the ffMpg on the network, I’d still like to avoid using external programs where possible. We use deadline rather than backburner, although I’m sure the same thing would be possible.
you are talking about saving jpg, tga and png. are the jpegio, tgaio and pngio interfaces not working for you?
I didn’t know about these. Thanks for the tip. I will have a look into those interfaces for possible future uses.
Cheers, Yer all awesome!
Cg.
let’s say I can change it on-fly, how can I reload the configuration?
if the configuration will be loaded automatically on every render start there is a solution:
do render with specific settings
store the avi.cfg file somewhere for future use
on next render store current avi.cfg file and replace it with your configuration file
after render restore the original cfg
if the configuration will be loaded automatically on every render start there is a solution:
aye theres the rub, a quick test suggests not.