Setting a render?!

[dan1el]

I don't think you can.
Maya renders iff picture for every frame, then when done converts to e.g. TGA, PDS or even AVI.
but it's just a simple conversion (I think in fcheck) wich might make Maya crash (on Hugh renders)

I render TGA files and put them together in Adobe Premiere afterwards, there you can choose a codec.

Sorry your expensive software can't doexactly that...

[mar-one]

Maya will render an .avi file, it is a raw avi and will become very lage when you are done. You should never render useing avi out put it a and image and then put them into After Effects or what ever program u have.

Rendering in and image gives you more control over your render because if maya crashes for some reason rendering an avi its lost, with an image you can just start were the last image stoped.

[cshanks]

Yeah. I would always render out a .tif or .tga unless you want some serious headaches. Composite in another program.

[AndrewRaZ]

on a related note, how can you set maya to resume a render where it left off? the only way i know of is going back into the file and setting it to start up after it stopped. another unnamed program has an option to "skip existing frames." is there anything similar to that in maya?

[mar-one]

In the render settings under Image file output just put your last rendered frame as your first. I dont think there is a setting for it to do that atuomatic. You might try looking do do it like that over a network but I dont think so.

[Hezza]

If you are right clicking on your maya file and clicking render, then thats basically rendering from the command line. This is good for large renders because you don't have the overheads of having a copy of maya loaded taking up lots of memory.

If you want to alter the frame range it renders without actually opening the file in maya then you need to type the appropriate flags in the command line.

Open a command prompt (Start--> Run --> cmd)

Then navigate to where your maya scene file is stored.

then type: render -s 150 -e 300 filename.mb

and it'll render frames 150 to 300 from the scene filename.mb, using all the scenes saved settings apart from the start and end frame. Type render -help to get a list of the vailable flags you can change.

Also if you want to render with mental ray you have to use the '-r mr' flag (For a list of mental ray flags type render -r mr -help

example:
render -r mr -s 150 -e 300 filename.mb

By rendering this way you can free up loads of extra ram to be used.

There is also this cool render organiser called www.renderpal.com (http://www.renderpal.com/) It allows you to queue up a load of files to render. This program actually saved my final year degree project by letting me have some sleep and not have to get up every couple of hours to set another render goign.

Anyway, hope that was some help
Hez

[smurfted]

incredible that thats not possible, but thanks very much for the alternative boys, works like a dream..

[Hezza]

Yeah theres no automatic feature to skip frames that already exist :( A simple check box would be nice in the render globals, either overwrite or skip existing files.

Smurfted: As others have said, you never really want to render out finished frames as an AVI, its much better to have uncompressed tiffs or tgas. If HDD space is a problem then you can output to JPG's, but maya by default has its JPG quality set to 80% so you get some nasty artifacts. You can edit one of maya's setting files to set it to 100% but i can't remember which. If you are just trying to get an idea of the animation timing you've done, you can do a playblast of the active viewport. Just right click the time slider and go playblast -> option box. You can set it to playblast as an avi and set the codec it'll use. (Watch out for some of the mpeg4 codecs tho, i always seem to run into problems playblasting with them)

Also just one other thing to note, if you kill a batch render halfway through a frame, that frame file will have been created but will be screwed up. So when you re-start your render, make sure you overlap it by that last frame.

Hez

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