Rendering V-Ray using Maya batch

[Metzger]

Ok.. I just want to clear something up..

Currently you can generate a vrscene file and render that vrscene file on the farm then have a vrimgtoexr convert at render. This is a 3 step process..


The other way of rendering it would be by using maya batch and have it spit out out a multichannel exr, or what other format you wish.

Someone is telling me that if we use maya batch to render, it uses a limited amount of Maya licenses. I understand that V-Ray is limited to 10 per seat, but I thought Maya batch for rendering was unlimited.

Is this not the case?

[vlado]

From my limited testing, Maya in batch mode did not look for a Maya license in any way, but perhaps someone else can confirm for certain.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Cruz]

you can also render on a farm using a .vrscene directly to png, jpg, exr with channels and with seperate layers btw

[Metzger]

Cruz: Yep that's right. we tried that but it wasn't setup correctly and we had to default back. Does the frame padding default to 4? I think when the frame padding of 4 is added, it puts a frame padding of 8. Might be a bug.. Would like to know the truth about Maya in batch mode.

[mr furious]

Scott,

There is also a new option to render a zipped data box straight from batch or standalone. It's been in the very last 1.5 and 2.0, so why still the 3 part process. Were are rendering standalone straight to scanlinned zip data box multichannel .exrs.

[cdavis]

what renderfarm managment software do you use? or is it a in-house setup? if you dont mind me asking?

chris

[djx]

@ mr furious: Can you explain what is "a zipped data box"? Which compression type does it equate to in the render settings? We found that "Scanline ZIP" ( which seems to be the same as "default" ) gives us the best load times in nuke for single channel exrs, but not for multichannel. For multichannel, we got better results rendering to vrimg and then converting to exr (with vrimg2exr -compression zips). This is handled simply by a deadline postRender script so does not feel like an extra step.

However, I'm always looking for ways to simplify things, so based on you comments, I might have to do another comparison.

David

[CerpinTaxt]

As far as I understand you have unlimited licenses to render maya software (render -r sw) so I guess if you want to render with vray your vray licenses are the limit.
http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Instal...a/td-p/2822978
http://mayastation.typepad.com/maya-...licensing.html

[RobPhoboS]

This sort of ties into what you guys are talking about.
I'm on the educational licence, can I utilise another machine to help render a single image, or to render out one frame on one machine and one on another ?

[vlado]

This sort of ties into what you guys are talking about.
I'm on the educational licence, can I utilise another machine to help render a single image, or to render out one frame on one machine and one on another ?

You should be able to do this, yes.

Best regards,
Vlado

[RobPhoboS]

You should be able to do this, yes.

Best regards,
Vlado

Ah that's great if I can, I have just rectified an old machine that could be of some use (poor old thing).
Many thanks

[ALFRED_ST_MEDIA]

@cdavis: our render que is RUSH, which is a perl-based render que system by Greg Ercolano

Either vray standalone or batch, you have 10 slave licenses for every plugin license you have, so if you have 5 vray-for-maya licenses, you can render on 50 nodes via standalone or batch.

Hope this helps clear some air, if indeed it needed clearing.

-ctj

[Zach Gray]

Just to be clear on this, when you submit via mayaBatch, it doesn't use a UI license of vray! Uggggh.... I just wrote a vraystandalone submission command for Qube and a custom submit from maya for .vrscenes, when it sounds like I could have done it all thru the integrated mayaBatch submit!

I guess there are some performance and memory advantages to rendering standalone only though? It is a hassle having to cache out the scene for rendering, and would be faster to let mayabatch handle the conversion.

@cdavis: our render que is RUSH, which is a perl-based render que system by Greg Ercolano

Either vray standalone or batch, you have 10 slave licenses for every plugin license you have, so if you have 5 vray-for-maya licenses, you can render on 50 nodes via standalone or batch.

Hope this helps clear some air, if indeed it needed clearing.

-ctj

[mr furious]

We use rush with a custom rolled interface manager.

Each frame is submitted to the farm as a Maya batch.
A vrscene is created and then standalone is fired up. (foo.vrscene on the local render node)
Scene rendered via standalone ( most stable in our tests as we got some funky errors in the past with a batch only rendering solution)

As far as the image compression settings, in the Vray globals, click on the image compression button.
16 float (mostly, 32 in some cases) djx you're right, Scanline zip is the best, (especially with nuke), also click the check box that says data window (or something like that, I dont have it open now.)

What this does is create an "auto crop " or ROI in the rendered frame based off of the images alpha channel. This is the secret sauce that speeds up nuke renders! Previously this was only available in the vrimg2exr.exe but with lots of begging vlado put this in the the app. This data window is part of the .exr spec and nuke sees it properly. Other apps may not and you image may only be the crop vs the full frame with the "cropped" image placed properly on the larger frame.

Now unless you already have the vrimg2exr pipe set up... You don't need it to gain the benefits.

Coolio,

Andy

This works with single and multichannel .exr files.

[ALFRED_ST_MEDIA]

Zach Gary,

yes and yes, you can submit render -r vray -s 1 -e 150 -b 1 -rd //myserver/myfolder/mineminemine //myserver/myfolder/myvrayscene.mb

you can also render via vray standalone, requiring you to export a vrscene file from maya, then rendering with standalone. I've written a rush script for this, but for the most part, we render using mayabatch...lazy really...and yes, it does cause a performance hit with the mayabatch overhead, but that's the only difference I've found yet. Anyone else?

Just to be clear on this, when you submit via mayaBatch, it doesn't use a UI license of vray! Uggggh.... I just wrote a vraystandalone submission command for Qube and a custom submit from maya for .vrscenes, when it sounds like I could have done it all thru the integrated mayaBatch submit!

I guess there are some performance and memory advantages to rendering standalone only though? It is a hassle having to cache out the scene for rendering, and would be faster to let mayabatch handle the conversion.