Preserved Topic: Combustion....rendering problems....*emergency*....:'(

Everytime I go to render something on Combustion 2 Render Queues and tell it to go and start rendering.....the entire interface flashes and like only a frame has been rendered. I just cant get it to render the entire thing...and this is an emergency because I will be using Combustion heavily for some up and coming films I am doing.

I installed the service pack from the Discreet website the other night and it totally F***** up! I go to load the program now and it says Loading Plugins....with OK. So I click OK and it exits the program

Plus I try to start the Render Queue up and it says things like:
Cant open stringfile Locale\BitdepthStr.txt!
Cant open stringfile Locale\SchematicStr.txt!
but it continues to open up just fine.
All I want is to render:'(....and its causing me all this trouble!

Maybe I should just re-install Combustion 2 and then battle the problem as to why it cant even render anything at all.

My computer specs are: Combustion V2
Gfx card: 3dGForce2-MX
I am rendering particles and I am rendering them to .mov and .avi. Im not netrendering and the OS is Win ME. Would it make any difference if I installed Combustion on WIN2K? Im running a PIII 1.1 Ghertz with something like 256 RAM and such. I can render in other programs just fine.

maybe you'd get more response to this in the main or in the 3d forum. should i move it?

well to your problem: winME could be a problem, but im not sure.
also try rendering it out to straight bitmaps if thats possible.

I try installing it onto WIN2K and see what happens and give the .BMP thing a shot as well.

Yeah dude you can move it. Thanks

~transferred from the multimedia forum~

I hear what your saying. Ill try installing it into WIN2K and see what happens.
Last night I re-installed it minus the service pack this time around. It does render now....but say I have 30 frames then it only goes as far as frame 8 and a very short .mov file is made. But if I was to do Compoiste it renders fine.

What I think I might do is play around with that service pack and only update certain aspects....by simply doing copying and pasting,etc. So that way it might fix the render problem cos the whole screen flashes after frame 8. Then Ill try installing on WIN2k. And then also I could get to render upto frame 8 and then tell it to re-render from frame 8 upto as far as it can go and see what happens from there. And then there is my mate's computer I could install it on seen it is different.

Here's hoping.

afaik ServicePack #3 is now out for win2k.

What does that mean then?

that you maybe give it a try and install it?

I see then. Thanks man I will have a look at it. But guess what? It works now! This is how it goes:
Well....I dont believe it! It does render now FINALLY!
I think the problem was what I was telling it to render to. I open the particles workspace under Composite and simply pressed play. I had the setting on best and so the program had to render it and then I was able to play the animation of the particle in the viewport just fine then. Then I played around with the render settings and nothing much eventuated from that. But when I told it to render to an .avi file BUDDA BING BUDDA BOONG!....IT WORKED! I named the file Output.avi cos I noticed Combustion automatically named it that and I think I might have been naming it wrong. The actual .avi looks fantastic as well.

In conclusion I think it might have been two things: I didnt tell it render the animation in the viewport and when I told it to do a final render it was trying to do two thigns at once. Also I think the render settings just needed to be tampered with and the naming of the file was adding to it that caused the render queue to fail.

In the future perhaps next year, I would love to ask pple what sort of tutorials they want to see for Combustion because they're not that many out there Which really sucks cos it is such a GREAT program and many pple would love to know how to use it Im sure of it.

Thannks for replying grumble