render cmd line args, -s and -e ignored when using render layers

[djx]

A scene with renderlayers rendered using this command line:

render -r vray -rl layer1 -s 11 -e 11 ...

If the scene has been saved while layer1 was selected then this works correctly and renders frame 11, but if the scene was saved with the masterLayer selected, then the renderer will ignore -s and -e and render the frame range specified in "render settings" window.
Obviously this creates big problems when dealing with several render layers in a scene.

[milena.sarneva]

Thank you very much for pointing that issue and for the message with more detailed information.

I will look into it and will get back to you.

Best regards,

Milena

[alainfx]

Hi,

I don't see this bug here, maybe there is something else that triggers the problem.
I have VRay for maya 1.50.SP1, with Maya2011, on Windows Seven 64 bit.
Do you have the same version ?

Cheers.

[milena.sarneva]

I was not able to reproduce the issue as well, so I PMed djx for more details and it seems the problem is with when using DR - the values of the frame ranges are overwritten by Maya just before rendering the layer. As I said, the batch/command line renderer is handled by Maya directly, so not much control over the values.
It could be a Maya issue, I still need to investigate further.

[djx]

I really appreciate you guys taking the time to look into this. After reading your posts I did some more tests with a new scene and I discovered one important thing that I did not notice before. The problem is only happening when there is a layer override on the start and end frames.
So for example I have the masterLayer and layer1. The global frame range is set to 1 to 20 but layer1 has overrides on the start and end frame set to 10 to 15. When I send a job to the farm, the rendermanager finds the correct frame range from layer1 globals and sends a single frame to each slave with the following command line (each slave gets a different frame obviously)
render -r vray -rl layer1 -s 11 -e 11 myScene.mb

If the scene had been saved while layer1 was selected then everything is ok. Each slave renders the frame that it was assigned.
But if the scene had been saved while masterLayer was selected, each slave renders every frame from 10 to 15 instead of the single frame it was assigned.

We rendered a 375 frame job on the weekend. On Monday we couldnt work out why the frames were all there, but the job was still running and then we realised that each time a slave was sent one frame it would render 375 frames. On completion the rendermanager would send the next frame in the queue and that slave would render all 375 frames all over again. So it was trying to do 375x375x30 frames!

The problem does not occur if I render with mentalray, so I suppose this is a vray thing. Setting frame range overrides on layers is something we do fairly often, so it would be nice to get it fixed.

[milena.sarneva]

Thanks for the additional information, I will try to look into it using layer overrides.