Skip Render Passes?

#1

Is there a reasonably straightforward way to choose a selection of render passes and skip others?

I know about the ‘write to file’ checkbox, not a solution.
And I looked into batch files a bit (xsi -r), which have pass selection tools, although the docs said that rendering through the batch shell was slower and that defeats the purpose.

The problem is I have many (18) passes and with each added pass, it gets exponentially slower to switch from one pass to another. This more than doubles the overall render time. Rendering doesn’t take much time, but as XSI activates the next pass, it chugs a lot.

Thanks,
Tui

#2

If you just want to render a couple of passes, just select them in the explorer and in the render menu go ‘render selected passes’.
Unless I don’t understand your question…

Slowdown when using a lot of passes is something that has been worked on after version 7.x
I noticed it’s quite a bit faster in 2010(SP1). Also a ton of partitions in a pass will slow things down as well. Still beats any other method of rendering out what you want though :wink:

rob

#3

If you render from the command line, use xsibatch -render with the -pass flag. That won’t be slower.

#4

Great, thanks for the quick replies.

I couldn’t find ‘render selected passes’ in the render menu, but on a whim, ‘render current pass’ does the job (despite it’s name).

I’m not very familiar with the command line, but I’ll keep it in mind and see what I can hunt down through Google.

Thanks again.

#5

Render>Render>Selected Passes :wink:

rob

#6

Sorry Rob, it’s just not there for me. I only have 3 options:

Render>Render>Current Pass
Render>Render>All Passes
Render>Render>Options

But again, no problem. ‘Current Pass’ renders all my selected passes, so it’s all good.

#7

Sorry Rob, it’s just not there for me. I only have 3 options:

Render>Render>Current Pass
Render>Render>All Passes
Render>Render>Options

But again, no problem. ‘Current Pass’ renders all my selected passes, so it’s all good.

#8

Very odd…

rob

#9

Yeah, those look nice. Maybe because I’m still on 5.1? I really like the ‘copy render options’ feature. I’ve been looking for a way to do that…

Thanks anyway :slight_smile:

#10

5.1??? Dude, that’s old :eek: :smiley:

And that would explain a lot of other questions you’re having. There’s a ton of new/changed features in Softimage after 5.x that would make your life much easier.

Don’t you have any chance to upgrade to 2010SP1??

#11

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