vray.exe: renderable cameras not respected?

[Fredrik Averpil]

Hi,

I render a vrscene with maya_vray/bin/vray.exe which I've exported out of Maya but it keeps rendering the persp camera view, and not my renderCam render view. The persp is not renderable and the renderCam is renderable.

Is this a bug or is there some way I can define which camera/s should be rendered?

[t.petrov]

Are you sure you've exported the correct camera in the vrscene file?
V-Ray standalone renders the camera that is written in the scene. And most of the time there is only one camera written there.
You can search for the RenderView string in the vrscene file to check if you have more than one camera view in your vrscene files.

This might be normal if you have camera projections in your scene. But this shouldn't affect the renderable camera.

[Fredrik Averpil]

Well, I'm not sure how it does the export in detail as I am new to exporting and rendering .vrscene files. All I did was, in the "Translate" tab of Render Globals:

1. Untick "Render".
2. Tick "Export to a .vrscene file"
3. Perform the vrend command, just like this without any arguments: vrend
4. Executed /maya_vray/bin/vray.exe with the .vrscene as inputFile.

I've made sure that Persp is not renderable in Maya and that my camera "renderCam" is indeed renderable. But it doesn't matter. The resulting image is the persp view (which by the way was the only active view in my Maya viewport when exporting the .vrscene).
Is there any other way I should export my vrscene from within Maya?

Edit: There was only one occurance of RenderView in the .vrscene file. Also, when looking thought the renderCam camera (in the Maya viewport) and exporting the .vrscene file, the .vrscene rendered correctly, though this renderable camera. Just to make sure, I switched back to Persp in Maya, exported another .vrscene and started rendering that. Again, it rendered the Persp view. So from my point of view, it seems that the active view is the one being exported ... (which seems odd, to say the least).

Maybe a related question; if I have multiple render layers and multiple cameras in my scene - how would I go about exporting a .vrscene that would render the renderable cameras/render layers?
Would I have to export multiple .vrscenes?

[t.petrov]

Have you passed a -camera flag to the vrend command?
If you haven't probably you should try it. It requires the path to the transform node.
For the layer I think passing "-layer" should work.

[Fredrik Averpil]

No I haven't, I'll try that. Can I give the .vrscene multiple cameras?

Is it possible to list all arguments (-camera, -layer, etc) that can be used with vrend somehow?

[vlado]

Can I give the .vrscene multiple cameras?

No. V-Ray for Maya exports only one RenderView plugin instance. Even if there were more, V-Ray Standalone would just render one of them.

Is it possible to list all arguments (-camera, -layer, etc) that can be used with vrend somehow?

For the moment, no (we didn't really expect people to call it directly). It is on the "to do" list to add some help text. Until then, please ask

Best regards,
Vlado

[Fredrik Averpil]

Ok, great thanks!

[Fredrik Averpil]

Hey again,

When I export a .vrscene with vrend -camera <cameraName> -layer <layerName> and then render that with vray.exe and -frames=1-20, it seems that only the frame I was currently looking at in Maya was exported. When exporting via vrend, do I have to specify a framerange?

[t.petrov]

I think it should read the settings in the RenderSettings -> V-Ray -> Animation

[Fredrik Averpil]

I know it sounds weird, and I don't think I'm doing it wrong. I've got "Animation" ticked, my start frame is 1 and my end frame is 20. I export the vrscene with the command posted above and I render with -frames=1-20 ... but I only get 20 identical frames which match the frame I'm currently on inside of Maya at the time of the .vrscene export.

Are you sure it should read the animation settings in the "V-Ray Common" tab?
Right now it's impossible for me to render animations with .../build-install/maya_vray/vray.exe

[Fredrik Averpil]

Hi again, I found the issue. I had "Render animation only in batch mode" ticked.