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It would be lovely if parameters could be batched so that dozens of images can be generated overnight. ;D

That could be faked with the animation feature.

Just set each image to a keyframe, with one frame to the next image.

You can swap out base formulas with no problems.  The keyframes do not need to be related to each other in any way.

Hope that helps!

I have never tried that with the animation maker but in this case I would advise to use the 1.6 version with linear interpolation. Another possibility is to launch several M3D.exe simultaneously, this is sometimes what I do when I want to play while another one is rendering.

It's an old trick from working in Carrara - my 3D Art program of choice.

I haven't confirmed it on the new version yet, but when I accidentally forgot to clear the last animation from a render when I started a new one in an older version - it worked!


EDIT - Oh yeah, wouldn't running multiple instances of the program become overwhelming to many systems if they were all rendering at once?  



EDIT AGAIN - Just confirmed it - this trick still works in 1.6, so Batch Rendering is only a little more complicated than ideal, but still easily done.

Just load the first parameter set, create a keyframe, load next, create keyframe, and repeat.  Just be sure to set the frames between keyframes to 1, or you'll get many duplicate images!

Using the animation feature for batching was also my first idea, but there are some drawbacks:
- The image sizes are all the same
- Saving just as BMP's, so no postprocessing is possible

But it should be not a big problem to make an own batch feature, so that imagesizes and output
format can be choosen more or less freely.

Running multiple instances of M3D can be critical, that depends on the system:
- Too much memory used, so harddisc swapping occurs and rendering becomes much to slow.
- There may be timeouts while rendering in special cases what could cause corrupted images.

Another point on the list  :dink: