Hi,
I tried mailing three times whether the current promotion is valid for bundles. Since I got no answer I am trying it here. I guess there is no discount for bundles so i can just wait until the end of the year and hope the new version of Render Manager is ready. Any idea when? Would love to use Scene Manager in that combo.
Hi Erik,
The current summer promotion is not valid for the bundles. Since the bundle itself already has a pretty good price usually it is not included. Regarding your emails, sorry we never received a question from you. If you have any questions or requests please address it to support@pulze.io.
Regarding the Render Manager if you can write to our support address I can provide you a beta version now.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your reply. I sent all mails to exactly that address. Strange!?
Because of the nature (timeframe, size, etc) of my projects I am trying to avoid betas and frequent software changes. My trials of your tools some time ago showed some incompatibilities with my workflow. The issues with SM have been solved, the ones in RM should be now, but I will wait for the final version.
Since the current promotion does not offer a better price than normal for SM+RM I just wait for the final release and then see by trial if it can fit my workflow at that moment with all the other tools I use. RM is a nice tool but it has to be rock solid and fully compatible and most of all headacheproof 
Hi Erik,
That is strange indeed, I’ve seen that you had at least one ticket with our support so it worked before. Anyway you can also send your question to info@pulze.io if that works for you.
I totally get your point with the frequent changes, we all want to avoid them as much as possible. I would still say that its worth trying RM 2 even for just a day or two if you have the time. I would be interested in your workflow and what are the things that RM 1 fails to do for you.
The great thing about the beta is that it is still pretty much formable so this is the perfect time to talk about missing features, problems, etc.
Anyway I’m sure you will be notified when the release comes
Peter
Hi Peter,
My preferred workflow is to have lots (could be 100s!!) of XRef scenes that are disabled and on standby. Depending on what I need to do (lighting, materials, animation, etc.) I have a script that mass-dis/enables these XRefs (all or subsets). This also keeps the loading and (auto) saving fast. In a second Max instance I do the xRef editing. My main base file is rarely bigger then 20-30MB, compared to some gigs if I had everything loaded (even with lots of proxying).
The only (big) problem I have (Max2020/VRay5), is that sometimes out of the blue rendering starts with (5-20 min of transforming vertices), which can only be solved by saving, resetting Max and reloading the same scene, after which it skips the “transforming vertices” in a split second. Since nobody knows a solution for this, it might be a memory leaking problem with one of the tools I use, but just tell me how I can solve this in a fast way without losing much time!?!?!?
Sept. 1st I am temporarily moving to a new location which gives me a few days to experiment with my setup. So I could try to test out RM2 too. Could you also reset the trial for SM then? It is currently activated, but I dont have the time to test it out now, so you can deactivate that one. The last trial I had with RM showed some incompatibilities with PSD-manager that could only be solved with a little hack, which in turn made me wait for the final release. As explained above, what could help me a great deal is a way to mass-dis/enable XRef-scenes/objects combined with named subsets of these xRefs. Then I wouldn’t need to enable/disable sets by hand for each test render, and leave that to RM on another machine.
Thanks, E
Hi again,
Another important feature, which I don’t know if it already exists…most probably needed in SM.
Is it possible to save a set of objects to be rendered with a certain material. While populating scenes with trees, people, cars, interiors, etc. which often is started while the exterior concepts are for reviewing with the clients, certain parts of the scene I want with default materials (no textures, no displacement, without certain lighting, etc) for VERY fast setups. Having these sets at my fingertips would certainly help a lot!
I just arranged SM subscription, since I can do the required things easily with the current version.
Only thing I would like to know, if it is possible to send a job to the render manager, with an XREF list which I do not need to enable in SM, but want to be enabled in RM for rendering. This way I save a lot of time waiting for MAX to load long lists if XREFS, which in the current projects takes at least 10-15min per cam view. In other words: can RM enable disabled XREF lists in the background before rendering. (Probably it would need to start up an instance of Max in the background to do that, but still that would make quite the difference)
Have been looking into the above XREF thing a bit further:
By using a pre-renderscript like
(for i = 1 to xrefs.getxreffilecount() do
(
xrefs.getxreffile(i).disabled=FALSE
)
I could enable ALL XREFS outside of Max when sending jobs from SM to RM.
So in theory it should be possible to make an extra checkbox (like enable at rendertime only) in the XREF card, to make it possible to only enable selected XREFs.
More findings:
While having a bunch of XREFs loaded and disabled in Max’s XREF-scene panel, I can have a selection of them loaded in SM’s XREF-scene panel. When using the previously mentioned pre- and/or postrender scripts, they affect all the XREFs loaded in the Max XREF-scene panel. Would it be possible that the pre- and postrender scripts affect ONLY the XREFs loaded in the SM XREF-scene panel? That way I can make an XREF-selection per camera that needs to be loaded at rendertime. Being able to access the SM loaded XREFs with maxscript would help too of course.