How to start animation rendering in linux

[Jambert]

Is it possible to start an animation rendering in indigo_console under linux (ubuntu) and how?

thanks

[Jambert]

Ok so I must launch manually each render?

[CTZn]

I think your question needs to be more precise. Can you explain why you don't use an exporter ? Could you generate such a script under Windows, if you happen to use it ? What's the context you are facing ?

The short answer Jambert: there is no reason why you could not do that. Usually the exporter does it for you. indigo and ingigo_console are launched the same way, there is no specific manner to use indigo_console (apart that parameters can optionally be specified into the command line to launch the later).

I'm no linux user but I believe there where no answers so far because the question was lacking some precisions, I hope this helps.

[SATtva_]

Lets say our mysterious unnamed exporter created 300 frames with Indigo data (namely, .igs and -meshes.xml) in the target directory. Each frame is of name anim-frame-NNN. What you need to do now is to execute something like this in the console:

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for i in `seq -w 001 300` ; do ./indigo_console -o rendered-frame-$i.png anim-frame-$i.igs ; done

[Jambert]

Thanks, will try it but I don't have time now
I use blendigo, it generates a script that work in windows but not in linux

[Grimm]

Hi Jambert,

I have done animations with Indigo on Linux, although Fedora 9 not Ubuntu. Shouldn't make much of a difference though. I used Dr. Queue to control my renders. Are you running a cluster or have a multi processor CPU? Dr. Queue does take some scripting to get the renders to work right. Let me know and I will share the scripts that I wrote for it.

[Jambert]

Yes I'm running with core i7 and soon on multi cluster, I'm very interested by your script

[Grimm]

Ok, here is the script. It's a quick and dirty one, but it works. It is written in Ruby so you will need it installed on your system. Dr. Queue only really understands frames, so not good at all for single images, but works ok for animations. Here is the script, you will need to change some of the parameters to match your setup. I just named the script indigo_render.rb and put it in the Dr. Queue directory in "etc".

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#! /usr/bin/ruby
# A DrQueue script to run Indigo renders on a render cluster.

# Define default variables
$file_prefix = "globe-"
$image_name = "globe-"
$dir_path = "/home/jason/cluster/indigo_v1.1.9/"
$indigo_path = "wine #{$dir_path}indigo_console.exe"

# Get information from node
$frame = ENV['DRQUEUE_FRAME']
$frame = "00"+$frame if($frame.length == 1)
$frame = "0"+$frame if($frame.length == 2)

filename = $file_prefix+$frame+".igs"

cli_command = $indigo_path+" -o "+$dir_path+"renders/"+$image_name+$frame+" "+$dir_path+filename

puts cli_command
system( cli_command )

puts "Render Finished"

The first variable you will need to set is $file_prefix, it is the first part of the igs file names that Blendigo writes out for the animation. This is one part of the script I would like to change. I was thinking that you might be able to pass this from Dr. Queue to the script through an environment variable, but I never got to it. So, you either need to change this every time for every animation or you can name your animations with the same name and just remember to move the files before you start another one.

Same with $image_name, this is the output file prefix of the image files that Indigo write out.

$dir_path is the path to where Indigo lives.

$indigo_path is the Indigo command as it would appear on the command line. Notice that it is currently set to run Indigo under wine. If you are using the native Linux version, you will need to change this.

How I set up Dr. Queue was to NFS mount a directory on the master computer that had both Dr. Queue and Indigo installed in it to each node. When you start up the Dr. Queue slaves just point them to this same directory. Because each of my nodes (and my master) are dual cores I just made sure that Blendigo was set to 2 cores when I wrote out the animation files. That meant that I was rendering each frame with 2 cores on each node and the master. To run the script you just point to it when you set up the job in Dr. Queue. I hope this is helpful, let me know if you have any problems.

[Jambert]

wow thanks for the script and explanation
First I must install and run drqueue, if it's work I'll probably make a tut