It is VERY important that you read this section carefully before submitting a scene. It will help you avoid common mistakes.

• Please verify before sending the scene that you have saved it with all the correct parameters. It is your responsibility to provide the scene with every parameter correctly set. The scene will be rendered exactly as you send it.

• If you use your own plug-ins / scripts / MDD / other files, etc., do not forget to include them in your project (see section #2).

• Do not use accentuated / non-alphanumeric characters, spaces, apostrophes and dots in the filenames of your project (scene, textures, objects, etc.). To avoid any possible parsing problems on the RANCH Runner, please use only letters and numbers. You can also use the “_” sign (underscore) to replace spaces.

• When you submit a high resolution still image as your project, please make sure that both X and Y resolutions are multiples of 16 pixels. It is essential for our high-speed adaptive tiling algorithm to work. If this is not the case, the project will be rejected.

• Do not forget to check the “Save RGB” option in your Lightwave scene (Render Globals/Output) before you save it.

• The RANCH always output high resolution still image projects in .PNG format (if another output format is specified in the scene, it will be ignored). This format offers the best compromise between quality and size, with a highly efficient lossless compression algorithm. You can of course convert the image afterwards in another format with your favorite image editor. Note that this is only for still images: when rendering animations, the image format specified in the scene will always be used.

• Please always specify individual frames rendering for animations output (.bmp, .tga, .rla, etc.). We cannot directly render an animation to a video file format like .avi, .mov, .wmv… due to multiple differences between video formats, codecs, platforms, 64-bit incompatibilities, etc. In any case it is always best to render individual frames, for a lot of reasons: more security, better quality, ability to do compositing, ability to try different compression methods afterward with your video editing software, etc.

• When you submit a still image project, please be aware that some post-processing plugins needs the complete image to work on (for instance image processing plugins such as glow, etc). As the full resolution image is cut into many tiles during the render, the plugin would process each tile as the whole image, and discontinuities would appear in the final render. It is safer to leave such post-processing effects to your image / video editor when the render is finished.

• If you use radiosity in your projects, we highly recommend you include a radiosity cache file pre-rendered on your system (see section #2) to avoid discontinuities in still images or flickering in animations. 3

• The RANCH cannot support camera switches in the middle of an animation (due to lwsn.exe limitations). If you have a project which uses camera switches, cut it in several sequences, each with its own camera, before sending the files to the RANCH.

• Do not specify a region area to render, as it will not be taken into account. The RANCH always renders at the full resolution specified in the Submit project form, and uses its own integrated algorithm to subdivide a high resolution still image into numerous tiles to optimize render times.

• The RANCH does not support the Arbitrary Range Type function of Lightwave 3D. So if you want to render, say, frames 1 to 100 and frames 300 to 400 of the same scene, you will have to submit two projects (the same project, but with different frame ranges, the first with 1-100, the second with 300-400).

• Please always use relative paths (Objects/MyObject.lwo) instead of absolute paths (C :Project1/Objects/MyObjetc.lwo) for objects and textures in your scenes. Absolute paths are tied to your system, when relative paths are universal. The RANCH will be able to find your objects and textures and render your scene correctly only when they are referenced by relative paths. For the same reasons, make sure that the .lwo objects used in your project also reference their textures by their relative paths (for instance Images/MyTexture and NOT <full path>/Images/MyTexture).

• If you use e-on software Vue xStream in your Lightwave projects, you must embed the Vue scene in the Lightwave scene before sending your project to the RANCH. To do so, please verify that you have checked the 'Incorporate Vue scene in Lightwave scene file' square in the Vue xStream options, before saving your scene.