As described in this note, AIR allows an arbitrary number of additional output images to be generated from a single render pass by adding additional Display calls to the RIB stream. In an animation you will naturally want each frame to render to a unique set of output images. AIR’s Display call supports a simple substitution mechanism for creating a unique file name based on the current frame number. E.g., for frame 27,
Display “+diffuse#4f.tif” “file” “varying color __diffuse”
would become
Display “+diffuse0027.tif” “file” “varying color __diffuse”
The frame number in a RIB file is defined with a FrameBegin statement. Unfortunately Massive does not include a FrameBegin statement in its RIB files. The enframe tool is designed to plug that gap.
Adding a Frame block with enframe
Enframe adds a frame block to a rib file with a frame number derived from the file name. For example,
enframe render0129.rib
would rewrite the file render0129.rib as
FrameBegin 129 ...rest of file... FrameEnd
Enframe also accepts a simple wildcard # for matching a sequence of files:
enframe render#.rib
Important: when translating a sequence of scene rib files generated by Massive, be sure that the agents rib files are NOT included!
