Encountered Errors In Maya's "Render Diaognostic"

[FiendishVegan]

I don't have all the answers you might need to solve all your errors but I'll try to give you some tips to get you started. You might want to do a File>Optimize Scene Size to clean up your scene a little and get rid of unused nodes. Always do a Save As before hand just in case it deletes something important...though I've never had a problem.

lambert4SG - is probably a shading group that isn't connected to anything. To see lambert4SG I would use the Quick Selection box...thats the textfield on the status bar that probably has "sel" next to it. Copy and paste the name of the object you want (lambert4SG) into it and press enter. Then go into the hypershade window and press the "Input and Output Connections" button...lambert4SG and its connections should pop-up in the work space.

I would use the Quick Selection Box again to locate the nurbs cube without a shader. From there you could simply assign a shader to it by right-clicking on one in the hypershade and saying "Assign Material to Selection" or you could locate the object in the scene by pressing "f" on the keyboard to focus on it...from there you could drag a shader onto it.

I don't believe you need to rebuild any of you highly tesselated objects. Instead select the object and open the attribute editor. From the attribute editor open the "Tesselation" section and check "Display Render Tesselation." If the object seems overly tesselated, play with the U and V Divsion Factors until its at the minimum acceptable level for the project you're working on.

My last tip would be to never ever render out to an AVI or MOV. It is always best to render out a sequence of stills and then assemble them into an AVI later in an editor/compositor. This is especially so when your animation is almost five minutes long! If you render into an avi and your render fails for some reason part way through you risk having to start from the beginning. There are many other reasons why not to render to a movie file and if you want to know more just search the forum...there has been tons of discussion on this subject.

Hope my ramblings are of some help.

Good luck with your project.

[andybiz_2004]

Hello FiendishVegan,

Thank Q for the really helpful suggestions on the render diagnostics. I knew Maya had a function to do a quick search on a NURBS object, but I didn't know how to access it. I learnt something new from u 2de :) After Optimizing the scene like u said, after running the diagnostics, the "lambert4SG" no longer appeared. So it was rectified. On the high count of some objects, I followed your advice on tessellating the object to a lower U/V count & it worked. I set the U/V values to 0.1 each & after test rendering, the object's curves still looked smooth as b4 :) There were still some objects that the diagnostics said had a high count, but I hid them under the layers I created because I don't want them included in the render. So that should not contribute to the slowness of my overall render if they're hidden, should it?

I'll also like to show u some of my rendered stills on the url below :

http://www.photoaccess.com/share/guest.jsp?ID=A2AE5A39F57&cb=PA (http://www.photoaccess.com/share/guest.jsp?ID=A2AE5A39F57&cb=PA)

Here are my animation details. Frames range from 1 - 4400 & total animation time (in Maya) is 4Min:54Secs @ 15fps. Since u mentioned that I should render a series of stills, which image format would u reconmend to work the best when converting to an .avi movie later on? Can Adobe Primier convert my individual still frames to a movie eventually? Which s/w would u reconmend for this?

I've read that glass & paint effects materials can significantly increase render times. Since I'm rendering some glass materials & paint effects (flowers), would rendering as a series of still images slow down the render time?

Also, 1 important question is (having viewed my screenshots), when I render as a series of stills, will all my 2D textures (picture frames, book/magazine covers, window sceneries) also be included in the render? I've decided to place my Maya scene file 2gether with all these 2D textures (scanned .jpeg images & swatches) into 1 whole folder. Will this help?

All your suggestions so far have really be beneficial to me thus far. Thank Q once again :)

Regards,

Andrew

[FiendishVegan]

Yeah premiere can definitely turn your stills into avi files. In fact I use premiere exclusivley for my work. With that in mind, I choose my image format based on what premiere supports. One of the ideas/benefits behind rendering out to an image sequence is that no matter what you compress it into later, you will always have a prefect uncompressed image of each frame. So I would recommend always render out to an uncompressed file format. Maya has only a couple uncompressed image formats that premiere supports. If I'm rendering out with mental ray( which is almost always ) I ususally render to an uncompressed tif... if I'm using the Maya renderer I usually render to targa (.tga). The maya renderer compresses its tif files and doesn't have an uncompressed option.

Since you mentioned premiere I'm going to assume you have access to a copy. So the trick to importing an image sequence into premiere is: File>Import.... highlight the first image in the sequence and check the "Numbered Stills" box. With the numbered stills box checked, premiere will handle the stills as if they were assembled into an avi. Also premiere requires proper frame padding of the image frame numbers. Increase the frame padding in maya's render globals until there is at least one zero in front of your highest frame number. Example:

myImage.000123.tif <- is good.

myImage.123.tif <- is bad.

Image sequences can be previewed in the fcheck program that comes with maya. It can also be used to change image format, numbering and frame padding. Its a very useful piece of software.

Rendering to an image sequence will have no effect on render time.

Rendering realistic glass effects requires raytracing which will slow down rendering significantly. Paint effects will also increase render times...however, because paint effects is a 2d post effect... a, lets say, grove of paint effects trees, should render significantly faster than trees that were actually modeled out with equal detail.

Rendering out to a still sequence is exactly the same as rendering to an avi, and will have no effect on 2d textures or any other file the scene requires.

Can I ask why 15fps? I don't know what your planning to ultimately do with your animation, and 15fps might be fine for viewing on the computer or posting on the net. But if you plan puting it to tape, DVD, etc. I would recommend 30fps. The fps can be dropped down to 15 later with premiere. But of course rendering at 30fps will take twice as long 30fps. So it all depends on what you have in mind for your project as far as quality and output.

Good luck with your project. You got some serious archetecture going on there. :thumbsup:

[andybiz_2004]

Hello FiendishVegan,

Thanks for your prompt reply. Good advice u give :) I'll definitely try out what u suggested. Anyway, this project is entitled "3D online Virtual Showroom For A Condo". Therefore the final product will be view using Flash Player 7.0. Eventually, my movies (created using Adobe Premiere) will have to be imported into Flash MX Pro 2004 to be played as a movie for the viewer to see. Premiere is a good choice for me b.c. I've some experience using it & I can add some dialogue & background music as the movie progreses.

Actually, to compress my movie files even further (catered for 56K dial-ups), I was wondering if Flash MX Pro 2004 can recognise the MWMM (Microsoft Windows Movie Maker) format. If it can, I can convert my .avi into .mwmm & import this format into Flash to be compresed even further. Once I've created my .avi movie, I'll try it in Movie Maker & try importing into Flash MX Pro.

But currently, I'm having problems rendering as a series of stills to the targa format. Tried it last nite. The script edittor said that it's working on frame 1, but after the next morning, it still says the same thing. No progress was made & my PC's harddisk LED was not blinking busily as it should when rendering. I suspect the reason is because I used a plug-in called mayaFileConverter.exe to convert from version 6.0 to 5.01 (I intended to render using renderplanet.com's free renderfarm which only supports version 5.01) The readme for this plug-in mentioned that the conversion's not guaranteed to be clean & some errors may occur. So I guess that's the reason why I can't render ofline properly. I've converted back from version 5.01 to version 6.0 after having some problems rendering with renderplanet. Have to diagnose what's causing my software not to render more than frame 1. Anyway, thanks for your help so far :) Btw, what's your profession? A CG Artist? I'm a multimedia student doing this virtual condo walkthrough for a condo developer in my area.

Regards,

Andrew

[andybiz_2004]

Hey FiendishVegan,

Sorry to take so much of your time, but I've posted another query on cgtalk entitled "Problem Rendering Animation" Just type this text in the search text field & u should see my new post. the full explanation is there. Thanks a ton for your advice & suggestions so far. It really helped :)

OK, see you soon :)

[andybiz_2004]

Finally I'm back in action. I managed to render a series of stills in Targa format. But the strange thing's that my rendered stills end up looking from the point of view of the default Perspective Camera & NOT from AnimCamera1, which I selected in Render Globals settings. Why is that? Because the view in each frame should be different as this animated virtual camera moves through the condo showroom. U can refer to this link for some of my screenshots :

http://www.photoaccess.com/share/guest.jsp?ID=A8461E2B24D&cb=PA

If u know what I did wrong, please let me know kay? A big thank you to you in advance for the help that u've given. Take care :)

[Shayder]

I've run into this a few time , seems to be a quirk of Maya. Go into the attributes of the Perspective camera and under> output settings> click off renderable.

And in the camera you want to have render make sure it has renderable clicked on.

Sometimes even though you have the camera checked in the render globals it will still render a different one.

[stallion151]

if you go to your outliner and RMB in there check DAG shapes, i am pretty sure lambert4G was just a derelict shader that wasn't properly removed....most crap can be got rid of with optimise scene, but if some still appears go to DAG in outliner and remove there.

[andybiz_2004]

Well, thank you for all the advice y'all have given. Yep, I solved the problem by Optimizing the Scene, so that the lambert5g error message no longer appears.

Also, I went to Maya's Outliner & selected the default Perspective camera. I then went to the Attribute Editor & unchecked "Renderable". In Outliner again, I selected the virtual camera I want to render from & under Output Tab, I checked "Renderable". After checking in Render Globals, the correct virtual camera was selected.

Now I'm rendering all my frames from frame 30-frame 4400. That is really a lot of frames to render & it takes quite long.

I tried importing a few of these Targa still renders into Adobe Premiere 6.0. What I did is I opened Premiere, then I went to File=>Import=>File. I selected the first rendered frame (30), chose "All Formats" as the file of type & checked "Numbered Stills". My understanding is that Premiere should then automatically import all the other rendered stills together with frame 30, but I could only import 1 rendered frame @ a time. Since I have to import a total of 4400 frames, is there a faster way to import them into Premiere? Or else it'll be extremely tedious.

OK, hope some1 can help me with this import problem. Thanks again in advance.

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