RPManager - Passes Errors

[voltaire585]

Since we work with really large files with many xrefs scenes we use RPManager, and it is really awesome if you need to not load XREFs all the time, just load on render.
However RPM does not work with Octane render passes. Id like to get some feedback from Otoy on this. Ive been back and forth with the developer who and he has said:

"I won't be able to support their render elements, at least not the way they have current implemented them, which does appear to be broken from a MXS access point of view:

Via maxscript I cannot create their elements - though I can list them - and even using the built in render element manager it won't return valid elements, ie if you add some elements to your scene and then evaluate

REM = maxOps.GetCurRenderElementMgr()
print REM.NumRenderElements() -- this correctsly prints the count
elem = REM.GetRenderElement 0 -- this always returns undefined.

Since I cannot create elements via script not retrieve them there isn't anything I can do. Getting in touch with the devs so they can expose the elements 'correctly' (in the say way every other element is exposed - they are doing something non-standard) is the only thing I would be able to do.

One thing I could do right now is have RPM ignore the elements entirely rather than erroring, which would likely leave the element list active per pass and not managed by RPM, I imagine you'd run into output path issues for them though (unless they end up embedded in the final output and not written separately?)"

"

[azen]

Hi,

This can be explored further with Octane 3. The feedback from the RPManager is clearly indicating a need for extensive reworkings - this is what is being done right now with Octane. It is unlikely that this work will carry over to 2.x releases (or at least, it will require a notable groundswell of community demand before resources are redirected there).

There will be many things that were unfeasible due to the extensive reworking of core functionality required to avoid unwieldy workarounds. These reworking are going to be delivered with Octane 3. Hopefully, this will be more than enough to accommodate RPManager, and other great tools.

[voltaire585]

Thanks Azen, your the man. I will check out 3.0 when it arrives.

And for everyone else who deal with massive datasets with a lot of xrefs, I can highly recommend RPManager, though it truth we only use 2% of its functionality.