Maya 2019 + Vray 4.30.01 always rendering masterlayer when batch rendering?

[yolov]

Wow, OK. That's very useful info, thank you for sharing.

[Morbid Angel]

I had big issues using render setup in production. It did not record overrides on referenced scenes correctly and messed them upon reloading the scene, this was in 2018 maya though. I don't think its a reliable system yet.

[waaazoo]

Ok, I had some down time between shots and got to the bottom of it. Its not a Vray issue at all, but since RenderSetup by default hides render layer info in the outliner it makes it hard to see whats going on behind the scenes if youre trying to find rogue layers. There's an option in RenderSetup preferences to enable all RenderSetup data to show in outliner. (I can see why they hide it by default) But I dug around and found some names of layers that had been renamed. These old layers, rather than being renamed and being fine, seemed to hang around as a non visible layer in render setup, but renderable when submitted....but also not as the old name, but called "masterLayer".

Weird, but at least its not the references or anything with the scene. Just need to be very weary of renaming RenderSetup layers and making sure you check how its all looking in the outliner.

Maya is very good at keeping things we don't want and we don't even know unless you dig into the hidden stuff on outliner. I can remember a scene starting to be slow. After looking closely into this I found sets from an old character, not from the scene, not even from the project. It must have been loaded by any prop or so I imported. And there were hundreds (maybe thousand) of these sets hanging around. You are supposed to be able to clean-up the scene with optimize scene size, but sometimes it just doesn't.
It's good to know about these render layers. I'll be careful with that.

[SonyBoy]

This problem is persisting, although I am using the legacy render layers (never found any use at all for render setup). Is there a fix for this?

Yes, I can use a render manager, but for simple testing that's really overkill. I have a lot of stuff in my scene, separated onto a variety of render layers and definitely don't want render time thrown at the master layer.

Fortunately, one fix for this is to turn on "render all layers" in Maya's Render View, and then use the VFB to output, which seems to respect the master layer's renderable status as OFF. But it would be good to see this fixed properly.

[Morbid Angel]

Are you rendering from within maya ui I assume? You probably need to use batchrender command from within the interface so it runs a subprocess to render just the "renderable" render layers.

[SonyBoy]

Render > Batch Render?

That's what I've been doing. It will render the master layer even when it's toggled to be unrenderable.

If not that I'm not sure what you mean.

[SonyBoy]

... and FYI, this problem seems to persist even when rendering with a render manager, in this case Smedge. Even if I send a render job with a render layer explicitly given, I'm getting my lovely master layer output instead. This is very, very aggravating as while I don't mind using the VFB workaround most of the time, I KNOW there's going to be times when I don't want to do that.

[Morbid Angel]

it should not be working like that. Here is a quick recording of what I get, which is what is expected.

https://youtu.be/6irboIZB3-M

[SonyBoy]

Yes, I know that is what's expected. That's not what I'm getting, and as I mentioned even when using a render manager that specifies an output render layer, the masterLayer is rendering first.

[SonyBoy]

Interestingly another workaround from inside the UI is to use "Render Sequence", which also seems to respect the renderable status of the master layer and does not necessitate checking "Render All Layers" in the Render View window, which I normally have permanently hidden anyway.

I've never understood why Maya has so many apparently overlapping methods of starting renders, and I don't know what the difference could possibly be between "Render Sequence" and "Batch Render", but it appears they may call different things with Batch Render starting render.exe, but "Render Sequence" starting the render a different way (but with exactly the same result??). So from within the UI this is a fairly easy workaround.

Unfortunately this doesn't address the issue of using a render manager (in my case Smedge), which also simply calls render.exe and as mentioned is also resulting in a rendering master layer even when an explicit render flag is used in the job, which frankly is inexplicable.

[Morbid Angel]

Alright, I got curious as to what or why it is not working for you. I opened that same scene as I recorded the video with. It renders without master layer. However I got on a new machine, and cleared the maya prefs so default prefs. By default maya opened with render setup. I added some render setup layers there and it started rendering with master layer. Disabling it seemed to have no effect. I saved the scene, reloaded maya with legacy layers, and guess what. Even with master layer turned off, it would still be rendering it.

Then I created a new scene with legacy layers and it worked as expected, only render layers have rendered (not master layer). After that I imported the previous scene into it, and master layer started rendering even though it was off. It appears if you at one point used renderSetup with the master layer issue, it will stick in the scene.

I would recommend 1 try empty new scene make some layers there send to batch render. See if that works. After that you may need to carefully import parts of your scene from previous file.

I bet there is a setting in the ascii that can be set to stop master layer from rendering...Ok, I text edited my corrupt scene in .ma and removed anything that had defaultRenderLayer, upon re-opening maya/scene I set the master layer to be non-renderable and its working again. Hope that helps you out a bit.

[SonyBoy]

Well, thanks that is interesting. However, I'm pretty sure that the most recent scene I've been having issues with has never had Render Setup enabled at any point. I have not yet tested whether clearing prefs might help, but will do so.

I also tend to use the .mb file format most of the time -- I know that .ma is more versatile but definitely results in larger files and longer save times.

You've got me wondering now whether having referenced files coming into a scene have anything to do with this. Previously it was never an issue, but since it seems from your test that defaultRenderLayer may have something to do with it, it could be that files with their master layer enabled upstream might be causing the problem...

Anyway, thanks for doing all this investigation!

[SonyBoy]

And.... deleting my preferences cleared the issue, at least when rendering from within the UI using batch render my master layer did not start to render first. Haven't gone as far as trying to use Smedge to see if it will allow for an explicit layer, but I would assume that's likely. Anyone know which preference might be causing this problem?