Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Distributed Bucket Rendering, Socket error when connecting to slaves

If you've tried to do a Distributed Bucket Render with Mental Ray and run into the dreaded socket error where the host cannot talk to the slave nodes, assuming you've set up your "max.rayhosts" file correctly, the error could be due to the fact that the Mental Ray Satellite service is not running. This will generate the socket connection error which at first, makes you think you have a network problem. Note that prior to release 2015, when you installed 3ds Max, this service was set to be started automatically and always ran in the background, ready to be used when you submitted a DBR. However, since release 2015, the service is installed but set to "Manual" startup type so you must access your system services and turn it on before rendering.

Monday, October 5, 2015

New Tutorial for Max 2016 Extension 1 "TextPlus" object

I've uploaded a new tutorial on using expressions to control the "Value as Text" option in the TextPlus Primitive, new to Max 2016 with Extension 1. You can find it on YouTube at:
This is a welcome new feature and I can think of a lot of uses for it just for working within your scene.