Rendering incremental change

Current Setup:

Rhino 5 + grasshopper 0.9 + Maxwell 3 + Python

My Experience Level:

Rhino: ~4 years; Grasshopper: ~1 month; Coding: ~1 year

Goal:

I've modeled an object (largely: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MitiJAK78Yc/T4uKNVhsDTI/AAAAAAAAAJU/jahRR...). I'm trying to incorporate a script which will incrementally change the value of some parameters and render each change. The quality at the moment is the least important issue.

Currently:

I'm perusing this forum and the web to accomplish this. So far, this is what I'm using to help be achieve my goal:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/batch-rendering-in-python... :: yet it uses vray (a possible option, but avoided for now due to costs).
http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/renderanimation-by-giulio... :: I've just downloaded the centipede plugin, but this seems to use 3D studio max

Motivation for posting:

I've never engaged with a forum before. Perhaps I'm searching the wrong terminology to find pre-existing help on this matter. If anyone could help, or point me in a probably helpful direction, I'd appreciate it.

If you're curious, I'm trying to generate a set of stimuli (3D objects) that will be incorporated into a visual perception experiment (research at a university).

Thank you.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Aaron Kurosu on October 30, 2014 at 2:49pm

Progress Update:It seems centipede might do the trick. I ran into some errors exporting the .obj files. The problem is that the "Directory" doesn't like spaces & files can't be saved directly to the base level of a hard drive, i.e., it wouldn't save to 'C:\'.

Example: At first I couldn't understand why it couldn't save the obj file. (below). It started working when I set the directory to a folder on the disk (below below). It was disheartening to read the centipede script was broken.

I just downloaded 2015 3DsMax and I will try to render the batch now.

Permalink Reply by Aaron Kurosu on November 19, 2014 at 6:16pm

So centipede is great for automating incremental change. I also implemented simply python scripts to tell exactly what change should occur at every increment. For renderings, I'm working on updating a version of this: http://wiki.mcneel.com/developer/scriptsamples/batchrender

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to prevent import options from asking me to press enter every time it opens a new .OBJ file; as well as skipping the prompt for selecting a rectangle after every initiated render command. In other words, I seek complete automation in rendering. Furthermore, I'm also figuring out how to automatically assign a material (something more basic). Then I'll post what I got.

RSS