Standalone render - beginner question

[wolfgang_himmelfarb]

first off, not sure where to post Standalone questions because I'm dealing with a vrscene. Let me know where the best place for standalone questions are.

I rendered a few frames using standalone but want to pick up where i left off. The scene i saved out is to render every nth frame and was doing just that when I had to kill the render seq. My options are specifying where I left off with overrides:

-frames=45-238
-skipExistingFrames=1"

I plug in the file and path to the vrscene and it works without an override. I add in a override like the ones above and I get an error. line 0: no file ... exists

What am I doing wrong there. This is quite basic and I am following the docs so not sure what to do.

[deyan.hadzhiev]

Hi wolfgang_himmelfarb, it would help us if you provide your full command line you used, as well as the full output from V-Ray.

Usually the error with

line 0: no file ... exists

occurs when V-Ray can not find the path to the vrscene file being rendered. So please double-check that the path provided to the "-sceneFile" argument is a path to an existing vrscene file. Also having this path as absolute is preferred.

[wolfgang_himmelfarb]

My tendency is to only use absolute paths, and this one is absolute. The issue is that the render kicks off without the extra command, just the file path. When I add -skipExistingFrames=1" it errors. It looks to me that it things the file path plus the additional command are all the same so it thinks its a missing file. How do I tell command prompt to render "this file" and do "this command?"

[wolfgang_himmelfarb]

I reversed the order and now it works - vray -frames=45-238 -sceneFile=...

This is not how it's described in the web docs though - any clarity would be great or if it's ultimately wrong, but I suppose I can manage from here too if this works.

[deyan.hadzhiev]

Hey wolfgang_himmelfarb from the screenshot you provided I think the problem is how you use the double-quotes to encapsulate the scene file name. From the screenshot it seems you have double-quotes between the arguments, while these should be used only for single argument. The order of the arguments does not matter, so here are a few examples:

# This is an example of using file name with space characters
vray.exe -sceneFile="C:\Users\John Doe\Scenes To Render\my scene.vrscene" -frames=123-320 -skipExistingFrames=1

# If the absolute path does not contain spaces - the double quotes may be omitted
vray.exe -sceneFile=D:\scenes\my_scene.vrscene -frames=123-320 -skipExistingFrames=1

# Having the quotes in different arguments will lead to wrong argument parsing, because quoted contents will be considered as a single argument. This examples is for WRONG usage:
vray.exe -sceneFile="C:\Users\John Doe\Scenes to Render\my scene.vrscene -frames=123-320 -skipExistingFrames="1

Notice in the last example that there is an opening double-quote for the scene file name, and the closing quote is in another argument. Again - the last example is intentionally wrong and each opening quote must have its closing quote inside the same argument. This will lead to the whole contents inside the double quotes considered a part of the value for -sceneFile. Please note that this quotes and how they are parsed is done by the CMD shell, so V-Ray has no control over that and you have to be careful how the arguments are separated.

[wolfgang_himmelfarb]

deyan.hadzhiev this is 100p the issue and I made some wrong assumptions but now I understand how this works. Thank you again.