How do licenses work? Do I need a license for every machine that renders from Massive?
Which video cards do you recommend?
How many agents can Massive simulate at once?
How close can Massive agents be to the camera? Is Massive only good for distant shots?
What are the machine requirements to run Massive?
How does Massive work with other 3D packages?
How do I render from Massive? Does it work with ______ renderer?
How do licenses work? Do I need a license for every machine that renders from Massive?
Massive is sold as a floating license. Massive can be run on any machine in your network, but the number of licenses you own is the maximum number of machines that can be running Massive at once. The number of processors running on that machine do not affect the count.
The procedural primitive plugins (Massive.so and run_program.exe) do not require a license to run, so if you are doing software rendering on a render farm, you would not need additional Massive licenses on the rendering machines.
Which video cards do you recommend?
Please see System Requirements.
How many agents can Massive simulate at once?
Massive can produce a final simulation of as many agents as you need. With very simple agents, hundreds of thousands can be run in one pass. Large numbers of more complex agents, such as typical humanoid agents, can be done in multiple passes, by simulating agents in groups of about 10,000 to 20,000, with each subsequent group able to see and react to the previously simulated groups.
How close can Massive agents be to the camera? Is Massive only good for distant shots?
Massive is very flexible in allowing the user to build any kind of agents from simple boxes to high-res hero characters. Agents supplied with high-res geometry and detailed motion can look good at any distance. Ready-to-Run agents come supplied with geometry that is suitable for viewing from a moderate distance, but their geometry can be easily replaced with higher resolution geometry by the user if the camera needs to move closer to them.
If your scene calls for facial close-ups, Massive allows blend shape animation for fine-tuned facial movements, so there is no real limit on nearness.
What are the machine requirements to run Massive?
Please see System Requirements.
How does Massive work with other 3D packages?
Massive is a standalone program, but can import and export files from other 3D packages. Maya integration in particular is strongly supported, as Maya animated lights and cameras can be imported into Massive, Maya skeletons can be imported and exported from Massive, Maya animated motions can be imported and exported from Massive, and Massive agent positions can be exported in Maya particle cache format.
Massive:
- accepts geometry for agents and terrain in Wavefront .obj format
- can import in .bvh
- can import or export motion in Acclain motion capture (.amc) or Maya ascii (.ma) format
How do I render from Massive? Does it work with ______ renderer?
Massive can do software rendering through RenderMan renderers, Mental Ray or high-quality hardware rendering directly from Massive. The RenderMan renderers supported at the moment are PRMan, 3Delight, and Air.