Documentation

Preparing a still image

Setting the scene for a still image project – Cooperative mode

To prepare your scene before sending it to the farm, do the following steps:

1. Open Indigo and choose the ‘Pack Indigo Scene’ option in the Tools menu.

2. Load the scene (.igs) to pack, choose a name for the packed (.pigs) version and save it.

3. Rename the .pigs file with the extension “.vui”. For instance, if your archive is “MyScene.pigs”, rename it to “MyScene.vui”. You must send a file with the “.vui” extension, it is essential for the automated renderfarm to detect the file as an Indigo project.

Please also try to keep the filenames short (less than 20 characters) for your scene and for your .vui archive.

When the preparation is done, you can send your project.

Resuming a cooperative project

This exclusive RANCH feature lets you resume a previously rendered cooperative project.

Let’s say you just rendered a project called “MyHouse.vui” for one hour, but wish you had specified a render time of two hours, because the Samples Per Pixel number is not high enough and the image is still too noisy.

Fortunately, the RANCH is able to resume a cooperative render! If you resend a project with the exact same name (in our example “MyHouse.vui”) and – obviously – the exact same X / Y resolution, the RANCH will be able to automatically retrieve the data from its projects cache and resume the render from the state it was in at the end of the last render. Other things to know about resuming:

  • All the data from a cooperative project is kept in the cache until the temporary ftp account for the project expires. Thus if you try to resume an old project (more than 5 days old), no data will be available and the project will be considered as a new project.
  • If you want to resume a project, you must send it from the same RANCH user account as the previous one.
  • Each resumed project, when finished, will itself be considered as a new project by the RANCH. It will have its own new ftp directory… and you will be able to resume it! It means that you can improve the original project progressively, through successive resume projects!
  • When using the resume feature, the e-mail you receive will confirm that the current project is indeed a resumed project.

Another good surprise for the end: when resuming a project, the RANCH will only use the data from its cache, and will not attempt to decompress the .vui file you send. It means that you don’t need to resend a big project file (the true scene) each time! Just create a small text file (it must not be empty though, its size must be > 0), rename it to the exact name of the original project – in our example it would be “MyHouse.vui” – and send it!

If the same name is found in the RANCH cache, only the previous data will be retrieved, so it does not matter that the .vui file you send is not a “real” .vui file. Of course, if no data is available in the cache for a project of this name, it will simply be rejected as an invalid .vui file.