Renderfarm integration

[spacematt]

Hi there, I'm trying to integrate V-Ray 2 into our in-house renderfarm scripts and have a couple of snags that maybe somebody could help with:

First, from the command line it doesn't seem possible to predict the filename of a vrscene when exporting from Maya. Sometimes the render layer will be appended to the filename and sometimes not. I'd like to avoid reverse engineering the logic, and also avoid having to open up a mayabatch just to peek inside the scene. Can I just force Maya to export exactly the filename I specify? I could hunt around for files after the process, but that's a bit hacky.

Second, our artists will be using irradiance maps, pre-cached for animation. How can we automate this efficiently? The only solution I have found is to have 1 render layer for the pre-cache, and 1 for the render. On the farm, the Maya scene will be exported to two vrscenes but this seems very inefficient. Is it possible to generate the maps, then render the images from the same vrscene?

[ivaylo.ivanov]

The shceme is not that complicated, if you have more then one layer, you will have the layer name in the file name. When you use tags, likie <Layer>, you can specify manually where the layer name should be positioned. Otherwise it depends on if the path is absolute or relative. The same logic is used for the image file names.

With Maya batch, you can use some scripting and do the GI pass before the actual rendering I think. With vrscene, you can use a custom scene preprocessing or the python scene access. The python scene access for the stand-alone seems not in the nightlies yet though...

[spacematt]

Thanks for the answers, I've worked around the filename issue by scanning the log for filenames. I'm afraid the logic isn't quite as simple as you described when references are involved, but that doesn't matter now.

I could do with a bit more info on the second point. What I'm hoping for is to be able to write out one vrscene, and from that one vrscene be able to render the vrmap, then the final image. I'm aware I could do some scripting inside Maya to write out 2 vrscenes, or even render out the vrmap from inside Maya, but these are wasteful of time and V-Ray interactive licenses.