Animator Bugs

Hi,

Am about to upgrade to SW2004 SP 2.1 hope this will address the issue....
I'm doing an animation with animator and photoworks that takes ages to
render (couple hours per frame)
I've not got enough spare time to do it in one hit but have thought I can
break it down and render it in 1.5 second sections overnight each night....
Now I did a dry run with non-photoworks rendered animation and this worked
fine.... when I try it for real however, the first section renders okay, but
the remaining sections won't. What happens is it'll render the first frame
(say, the frame at 1.5 seconds) and then it'll render that frame again, then
again then again.... as in it renders several frames but the counter on the
animator doesn't advance the animation.
Does anyone have an answer to this? Is it a bug that's cleared with SP2.1?
Help me, I'm going insane!

Cheers,

George.

 

Sounds exactly like a bug I reported ages ago. I've tried everything
I could think of to get around it. SolidWorks has never bothered to
fix it and I feel it's a huge problem!

On my system, I can almost pinpoint the moment things go south.
The top of the document window changes color to gray (you know
when you click on another window and it goes to the background).

The only remedy I've found that works is to lower the resolution
of the AVI (or bitmaps if saving as separate images).

I feel your pain!

Mike Wilson

 

GRRRR As I'd feared Mike..... Oh well... thanks for the suggestions.... I've
been trying to do a huge flash rendering but maybe I'll dumb down the res a
little bit and keep my fingers crossed it'll help.... there's a long weekend
coming up so if I can I'll try and get it to render the whole thing over
that and hope my PC doesn't go postal while I'm away

thanks,

George.

 

I have also had this problem. It seems intermittent though. When I've run
into this I just cancel out of the animation and start it over again.
Eventually it works.

Goes like this.

Have all your animation and PW2 settings ready.
Save the animation (I usually save avi 600 x 800 at 15fps).
Once the animation starts the animation control box will be on the screen
along with the PW2 status box.
Let the animation run through the first two frames (render box will go
through completely (2) times).
Once those frames are done check the animation control box. In the bottom
right corner it gives info on the total time of your animation and how much
time has saved out (ex: 1.00/20.00) If the two numbers match or the first
number is still zero after the first two frames have gone through then SW
will just keep saving the first frame over and over.
At this point I hit cancel on the PW2 status bar You have to hit it a
number of times and SW usually crashes to desktop.
Open SW again and try saving the animation.
After the first two frames if the first number begins climbing in increments
(based on your FPS setting) then the file is saving correctly.

I may have to do this 20 times but I have always had it work at some point.
It's VERY frustrating!!

I regularly do 30-40 second animations that may take 14-18 hours to save.
It's no fun to come back 18 hours later and have nothing.

I also submitted this back in 2004 beta testing.

 

Such a simple concept, yet I've never tried it. I must say, I'll
be giving that idea a shot!

Thanks,
Mike Wilson

 

Yeah this is all well and good.... but this is a rather complex situation
with many transparent shadows and many different lights..... depending on
the point in the anumation it takes upwards of an hour to render ONE
FRAME.... and a 10-second clip at 10 FPS, it doesn't take an engineer to
figure out that it could get tedious to keep monitoring it...... This is
exactly what I have been doing but as yet, no joy.... I think I'm going to
have to dumb down the res to 640x480 or below as I'm having no joy.

 

What do you guys use for a codec? Do you do your videos without compression.

 

None for me.

Yes for me.

Mike

 

I COULD use those resolutions and frame rates but the rendering time would
be horrendous.... I've knocked the resolution back to 640x480 from 800x600
and that SEEMS to have rectified the issue on my PC.... it cuts down the
rendering time too.... 10FPS seems good enough to yield a fairly good
animation.

I'll let you know how things turn out.

George.