Indigo Renderer Forum

Why indigo RT have to export the textures in a separate folder per frame instead of making it a single folder that contains all textures?
The igs and igq files are textbase so why can't they created to point to a single texture folder?
The mesh per frame is more logical but not the textures.

doreamon wrote:Why indigo RT have to export the textures in a separate folder per frame instead of making it a single folder that contains all textures?
The igs and igq files are textbase so why can't they created to point to a single texture folder?
The mesh per frame is more logical but not the textures.

You are mixing up stuff here mate, Indigo itself doesn't save any texture files at all!
This is actually Exporter related behavior. Its up to the Exporter Developers to have such a smart IGS file saved!

How about finally revealing what 3D app you are working with

Indigo only saves textures if you save a PIGS, the P stands for packed, and here all scene related files get zipped into that file...

Sorry I was typing fast. Lots of errors in my post.
I thought I mentioned it but anyway I'm using the Iclone plugin. But I'm not a long time user of Iclone(just over a month in fact) and it seems this is a new plugin developed just recently. It exports out mesh and textures for every frame in a folder.
So the export for a typical 100 frame animation is a few hundred megabytes for a very basic scene. I was surprised about that because I haven't used indigo and haven't used a render exporter at all. I mostly use vray and octane which are integrated and doesn't create temp files.
So this exporting of textures per frame is not in other indigo exporters?
Can anyone export out a simple 10 frame animation from another app and zip it all up? Maybe I can check how the parser is coded to see how different the xml is from the export from Iclone. I should request Reallusion to improve the export so it won't need to export the texture for every frame. Just a single texture folder with a unc path is enough.

doreamon wrote:Sorry I was typing fast. Lots of errors in my post.
I thought I mentioned it but anyway I'm using the Iclone plugin. But I'm not a long time user of Iclone(just over a month in fact) and it seems this is a new plugin developed just recently.

Not many Iclone users around here, in fact we don't know much about the export and capabilities there...

doreamon wrote:So this exporting of textures per frame is not in other indigo exporters?

No it isn't, the igs is referencing to the HDD you have the textures stored.

doreamon wrote:Can anyone export out a simple 10 frame animation from another app and zip it all up? Maybe I can check how the parser is coded to see how different the xml is from the export from Iclone. I should request Reallusion to improve the export so it won't need to export the texture for every frame.

No need for an example, its simply a unneeded step

doreamon wrote:Just a single texture folder with a unc path is enough.

even that is to much for doing 1001 preview renderings. Texture paths should be directly pointing to where they are taken from in the first place, why should they be copied at all?

Zom-B wrote:even that is to much for doing 1001 preview renderings. Texture paths should be directly pointing to where they are taken from in the first place, why should they be copied at all?

I really should test how other exporters work. Does it mean that in sketchup when you hit render there is no exporting to temp files at all and indigo renderer simply reads the absolute paths of the textures in the harddisk? Even for animation?

Actually, copying the textures would be great as an option, too, when packaging an animation sequence and sending it off to someone or to a renderfarm it gets packages to a zip file with relative paths. Typical with other 3d software for sending scenes to renderfarms. So I'm not against having a checkbox for that one at all.
I'm not sure if PIGS can contain all animation files since I haven't tested it yet on a IQS. Works nicely on IQI though.

doreamon wrote:I really should test how other exporters work. Does it mean that in sketchup when you hit render there is no exporting to temp files at all and indigo renderer simply reads the absolute paths of the textures in the harddisk? Even for animation?

Yes and no
Textures aren't exporter but only "linked" to where they are stored on the HDD.
But 3D meshes do get exported in the IGMESH format! I don't know about animation in Sketchup if this meshes get exported per frame!
It is possible to have a smart export coded where meshes only get exported once too, and then only if they do change, or new meshes appear during the animation...
This behavior has been implemented into the C4D exporter before, but was disabled because of some issues that still need to be fixed (I'm a C4D only user myself btw)

doreamon wrote:Actually, copying the textures would be great as an option, too, when packaging an animation sequence and sending it off to someone or to a renderfarm it gets packages to a zip file with relative paths. Typical with other 3d software for sending scenes to renderfarms. So I'm not against having a checkbox for that one at all.
I'm not sure if PIGS can contain all animation files since I haven't tested it yet on a IQS. Works nicely on IQI though.

You are right, packing all stuff together for transfering for Renderfarms is important (even if not supported atm from that site afaik!) But you only do it once per project after 1001 testrenderings, so it should not be the default setting

Indigo needs something like PIGS for animations, where it packs stuff smart! So Meshes that are static doesn't get included for every frame, but only once... same for textures etc.
On the other hand it needs to be thought of how Renderfarms do handle animations and what is the best solution for everybody

Amen, Zom-B!

Zom-B wrote:

doreamon wrote:I really should test how other exporters work. Does it mean that in sketchup when you hit render there is no exporting to temp files at all and indigo renderer simply reads the absolute paths of the textures in the harddisk? Even for animation?

Yes and no
Textures aren't exporter but only "linked" to where they are stored on the HDD.
But 3D meshes do get exported in the IGMESH format! I don't know about animation in Sketchup if this meshes get exported per frame!
It is possible to have a smart export coded where meshes only get exported once too, and then only if they do change, or new meshes appear during the animation...
This behavior has been implemented into the C4D exporter before, but was disabled because of some issues that still need to be fixed (I'm a C4D only user myself btw)

doreamon wrote:Actually, copying the textures would be great as an option, too, when packaging an animation sequence and sending it off to someone or to a renderfarm it gets packages to a zip file with relative paths. Typical with other 3d software for sending scenes to renderfarms. So I'm not against having a checkbox for that one at all.
I'm not sure if PIGS can contain all animation files since I haven't tested it yet on a IQS. Works nicely on IQI though.

You are right, packing all stuff together for transfering for Renderfarms is important (even if not supported atm from that site afaik!) But you only do it once per project after 1001 testrenderings, so it should not be the default setting

Indigo needs something like PIGS for animations, where it packs stuff smart! So Meshes that are static doesn't get included for every frame, but only once... same for textures etc.
On the other hand it needs to be thought of how Renderfarms do handle animations and what is the best solution for everybody

Ok that clears some things. Thanks.
I don't know how c4d and indigo works but its too bad they disabled that feature you mentioned.
In other appz the animation is baked to pointcache or mdd files which contain the animation data. This is only for mesh that contain animated deformation. For static mesh there's no pointcache or mdd created.

So if you had three characters moving, three pointcache/mdd are recorded that reference each character mesh. Its in xml format. Mdd is another format but also used a bit for recording mesh deformation.

So with sketchup I guess the reason that it doesn't export a mesh per frame is because the mesh in sketchup doesn't deform, its static. Afaik sketchup still only supports translation and not deformation.

For other appz that support mesh deformation I guess Indigo's workaround is to export each mesh per frame. I actually don't mind that because I know Indigo doesn't support pointcache or mdd. It would be great if it does because you have less files to deal with.

I'm more concerned about why the Iclone parser creates textures per frame from Iclone. They're duplicates. Seems like it was coded in a hurry by Reallusion.

Btw I tried packing an animation sequence of .IGMESH into a PIGS file. Not a good idea. Trying to pack 3 gigs worth of .IGMESH into a single PIGS file takes very long and would hang sometimes. It was a simple scene with two characters and one static mesh. It did exclude the duplicated textures so in the end the PIGS file was just 1 gig.

I hope the Indigo developer can chime in here and also consider supporting pointcache or mdd for Indigo. Or even alembic so animated meshes are not exported frame by frame. And comment on how Reallusion is going forward with the Iclone plugin.

This is the exported files from Iclone. I did frame 1950-2020.
I had to split the export procedure into sets of frames or else Iclone would crash trying to export 2000 frames in one go. Iclone is exporting the textures per frame as shown. The hdd is easily filled up

Exporting 100 frames per session from Iclone is pretty stable though. But still not ideal to do it that way ofcourse.

same with cindigo - it is exporting the procedural / color cinema shaders for each frame to one folder. It would make sense if they are animated...

perfahl wrote:same with cindigo - it is exporting the procedural / color cinema shaders for each frame to one folder. It would make sense if they are animated...

Really? Are they identical each frame?
How about static mesh? In Iclone the static mesh is still exported per frame which takes some hdd space. They're identical mesh that should only be exported once.
I would understand if its a deforming animated mesh because that would need a different "state" of the mesh per frame.

Well it's a feature that all developers around have persistently ignored, including myself

It is worthy to implement and only slightly time-consuming (aka boring to do ).

This is very urgently to be fixed imho throughout all exporters.
Working with huge meshes and textures animations in Indigo don't make sense for me until this is fixed.


Cheers, zeiti

zeiti +1

Cindigo doesn't export those if you uncheck 'Save .IGI' for quite a while.
Otherwise a real bummer though haha. Happened to me once where a longer sequence filled up almost 2tb of hdd space and froze somewhere down the line because ran out of space : D