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puckducker
09-17-2006, 02:12 PM
(Sorry, posted this in the wrong section. Is it possible for a moderator to move this to the Maya Rendering board?)

I'm having a couple issue's trying to setup my render pipeline on Maya 7.0

Ok, so ideally you set all your stuff up in maya, get your layers and render settings all prepared and good, and then you can close maya, navigate to your file, right click and select render. This will open up just maya's batch render program, which will render using your global settings, with the advantage of not having to run maya at the same time....so you get a little speed back. For a project I'm working on this is going to be very helpful since I'm rendering many many layers.

Problem is, I cannot get it to work with mental ray. My render globals are set to use mental ray as my renderer, and all my layers are setup to use mental ray....but using just maya's batch render system, they all render software only. All the stuff set for mental ray will render out with software, which doesn't look so hot since it's set up for MR.

Anyone else have this issue? I really want to get this working cause it simplfy's the whole system, since I'm rendering many layers, and on many different machines, and it'd just be easy to set everything all up, so I only have to right click on the file and hit render, then kick up my feet.


Oh, another question....anyone know how to set multiple render layers to use different render settings and render engines? Right now, all my layers want to share the same settings (unless I used override), and can all only be rendered using the same renderer.
ACamacho
09-17-2006, 07:07 PM
Never used the method of right-clicking the file to render the scene....hmm might try that. :) But I have been doing command-line rendering (which is the same thing really just extra options you can put). Anyway you can try opening up a command prompt and typing:

render -r file "filename" or better example:

render -r file c:\test.ma

Putting "-r file" tells maya to use whatever renderer each render layer has set up. Do it all the time at work where I have masks that don't need the heavy render settings like a color pass would need. Hope this helps.
puckducker
09-19-2006, 01:06 PM
Hey, excellent, thanks for the tip! I've never rendered from a command prompt before, so I'll give that a shot. I wonder why the defalt options would have it render without some of the layer info though....
ntav79
09-24-2006, 08:47 AM
Just render 2 times, Frist with the maya software and then MR
Thats it, took me 1 day to figure it out.
By the way its a bug and theres no way U can fix it but waiting for the newer version
Cheers
ACamacho
09-24-2006, 12:34 PM
I am not sure if it's a bug. When your just telling maya to render a scene through commandline it doesn't know what renderer to use unless you specify it. By default if no renderer is specified it will just use the software renderer. And you can change that by editing the defaultRender.xml in your maya bin directory. But it's just easier to specify it in command line.

Just add a "-r <renderer>"......also like I said earlier by adding a "file" as your renderer your telling maya to use whatever render settings you have for each render layer.

It's what I have been doing at work because I render a vector pass with maya software and also an occlusion layer with mental ray. Just set it and forget it. :)
puckducker
09-25-2006, 03:18 PM
Yeah, so far it's worked pretty well. I've rendered out multi-layer scenes with both mentray ray and software in the same batch, so the command prompt is working well.

The only issue I've run into so far is one of my occlusion layers came out rather blurry in a scene were motion blur was enabled. However, I have the motion blur overide on the occlusion layer turned on, so motion blur ISN'T rendered on the occlusion pass. Works fine in maya when I rendered it, but I got motion blur in the batch render.

I haven't really explored the problem yet, so I doubt it's anything I can't deal with. Worst comes to worst I'll just be rendering out a seperate batch for the occlusion pass with no blur.

Thanks for all the help from everyone though!
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