The answer is probably blatantly obvious somewhere but how do I recompose an tiled image? I have 100 pieces but have no idea how to put them back together.
Job sent from Max9
Cheers
Stuart
“Blatantly obvious” is probably the right expression. :o)
Did you read what the top of the Tile submission tab says?
http://software.franticfilms.com/content/support/deadline/plugins/3dsmax/_images/SMTD_UI_tiles_tab.gif
Or the online documentation?
http://software.franticfilms.com/content/support/deadline/plugins/3dsmax/submission2/content.html#tiles
“While you can render to any supported bitmap format using tiles, currently only EXR files (incl. all additional channels) are supported by the Combiner application that ships with Deadline.
This limitation will be removed in the future.”
So the short answer is - if you rendered to EXR, the tiles should have been combined automatically. If you rendered to anything else, it is up to you to figure out a way to combine them, but we are working on a solution to support all Max bitmap formats in the future.
Cheers,
Borislav “Bobo” Petrov
Technical Director 3D VFX
Frantic Films Winnipeg
I've been meaning to ask why only exr is supported. We try to always render exr so it hasn't been an issue. I'm just curious.
Ben.
Ben, it has historical reasons.
We were working on a shot for Superman Returns, in particular a shot that was supposed to go on the ShoWest 2006 reel. We had to finish it within a week and it turned out that one of the passes was taking close to 16 hours per frame. This meant that we would detect a problem with the frame after 16 hours, so we decided to add Tile rendering capabilities to Deadline and split the frame between, say, 16 machines to see a good frame within an hour.
Since Frantic Films uses primarily OpenEXR, it was the logical decision to implement a combiner for the tiles for this format first. And since OpenEXR provides all the advantages other formats don’t, we felt that it covered all bases for anyone doing serious VFX work.
The next update of the SMTD submitter will also fix the saving of Render Elements - right now Tiles rendering does not support Render Elements correctly. (As long as Render Elements are set to save as OpenEXRs).
Of course, we plan to provide a universal combiner app in the futuree that would work with any format like JPG, TIFF, BMP, PNG, you name it.
Cheers,
Borislav “Bobo” Petrov
Technical Director 3D VFX
Frantic Films Winnipeg