Rama woes with Xpressionist

#1

Hello,

I’ve got several versions of EI on my system (Mac) - 6.5r1, 6.5.2, and 7.0.1 (universal) and 7.0.1 (CFM). I am a PPC user and have a mixed render farm setup for 6.5r1, which works great. I’m attempting to setup the farm to use both 6.5r1 for legacy projects and 7.0.1 CFM to be able to use old plugins I’ve purchased.

Today, I opened an older project in 7.0.1 to try out some IBL reflections. This project has a single instance of Xpressionist and makes a wheel turn. When I sent this to the newly setup 7.0.1 PC slaves, a few frames render, then the slaves error out pointing to the Xpressionist plugin in the 7.0.1 CFM folder. The only way I can render that scene without error is to turn off XP.

I quit everything, rebooted and tried opening a different project using a single instance of XP to make an engine work and that one errors out on the PCs, but points to the 6.5r1 Xpressionist.plm. I even tried using the Universal version of EI 7.0.1 thinking it might override everything, but that chokes as well.

So, I need to find a way to use v7.0.1 on PCs with the CFM version on the Mac and have it use XP without error. Has anyone else had similar issues?

The other error I am seeing is that is says “An OS Exception has occurred” with no additional information. It seems as though the older projects are looking at the original XP file…maybe I should try adding a new XP plugin and redo the script…big pain…

Maybe it’s not possible to have this setup like this, but I’m not moving to Leopard anytime soon, so I would love to get v7 up and running on my farm. Otherwise, I’m stuck in 6.5r1 land until things can be sorted out.

Please help!

Ryan

#2

Have XP create keyframes(XP preferences create keyframes), then delete the plug. no more XP problems.

Cj

#3

Hi Ryan,

you do not need to “redo” the script if you use a new Xpressionist instance. Just save the script and reload it to the new Xpressionist plugin.

Even copy paste should work.

Jens

#4

Turning off XP did the trick. Just so I know, is there a difference between unchecking the XP plug in the timeline versus unchecking ‘live plugin’ in the info window?

Thanks!

Ryan

#5

Hi Ryan,

as far as I know the “live plugin” checkbox has no effect on XP. If you want to suppress all Xpressionist calculations you need to check the “mute” checkbox within Xpressionists preferences tab. To make sure Xpressionist does not get called during rendertime you need to uncheck the visibility checkbox next to the plug.

It should have no effect on rendering if the visibility of XP is on though. Patrick will look into this.

Jens

#6

BTW, your render farm sounds cool Ryan. Love to see a pic of your studio :slight_smile: :bowdown:

#7

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