CompuServe Messages

Glen: >> [NDUMP] Oh well, maybe an update is coming… You've described the problem well, however your analysis does not compute! <g> NDUMP, being an IXP, can only output those files while that process is running. Obviously, if your NDUMP machine is rendering frame 100, the highest possible frame that could be on your disk is 99. So NDUMP will copy those frames to whatever (PAR, Laser disk, ZIP file, etc.) and then finish rendering and saving frame 100. If your other frames finished the renderings by then, 3D Studio would not render another frame, so NDUMP.IXP would not get called to pick up those frames. If you have X machines rendering Y frames, assuming all of the machines are the same speed or slower than the NDUMP machine, NDUMP will get to frame Y-X. What we do here is just to render an extra X frames of the sequence, and this will always cause your 'important' frames to be properly processed. If you get too many copied to the PAR, you can always delete them! My attitude is that I would rather have the machines work a bit harder at 3:00am while I am sleeping, since they would then just stop and wait idle anyway. Works great, every time. There are hundreds of people happily running NDUMP every day, and only one has called to complain. They were trying to run NDUMP on a '386 with all the other machines on the network Pentiums. Was that your group in S.D.? <g> Greg Pyros