Working in Parallel

[dubya404]

Our animation team is using 3d Studio Max 5.0.

Having individuals make objects by themselves, then importing them into a single file was easy enough. Now that we have all our objects that we will use in the animation done, we are starting on the animation. How can we break into groups to do the animation? Is there a way each person can work on a scene, and when we are all done, merge them all together into one 30 second commercial? It would kind of be like editing digital video, small snippets of video, putting them in a time line, putting them into one file...

P.S. Looks like Chief Delphi enjoys thowing out money, that or they have never heard of phpbb.com .....


Dan

[MBiddy]

I never got to test out 3DS on a network so I don't know how the licensing works. There's a License Pool in the Portable License Utility, you may want to look at that. On separate unconnected computers there is definately no legal way to divide the program and have them working at the same time. You can swap the license from computer to computer though.

[dubya404]

No I don't mean splitting the program up, we have about 5 registered 3d max programs, running the educational license. What I am talking about, is splitting up the workload of creating the animation. The final file. It was easy for many people to make many objects at once, on different computers, then put them on a disk and import them into one file. Now we need to work on the animation, and I was wondering how we could each work on a scene, and if we could put all the scenes together into a final animation...

Dan

[MBiddy]

I don't know the video editing capabilities of 3DS by itself but if you have some other editor you can just render out individual sections and edit them all together.

[David Kelly]

Originally posted by dubya404


P.S. Looks like Chief Delphi enjoys thowing out money, that or they have never heard of phpbb.com .....


Dan

what are you talking about?? it's their money, let them spend how they choose to spend it

[Sunny Thaper]

I would say the best way to accomplish what you want is by using Xrefs. Basically everyone gets the same file in a way and each person does there own thing, then each time they save, everyone gets the changes done. You can also have it setup so everything that is Xrefed is in low polygon form so that people aren't slowed down by the insane amount of models they don't need.

[riley_ag]

you can have people working on different shots of your animation and then rendering them out seperatly. To put them together, use MAX's Video Post, or some other video editing software.
hope this helps

[Soukup]

i would take sunny's advice as well. Except if you still have modeling to do: use xref scene and then your partner can animate an unmaterialied low polygon model while you work on modeling and materialing it. That way you never lose any efficency.