Somethings broken my 4 year old UI script in 3.40.03

[snivlem]

Hi,

I've been using my own modified version of Maya's LevelTools for the last four and a bit years (without changing code).
It's basically a UI list of Maya ascii scenes with icons.



It's setup so that I right click on these icons and can reference in props. I can also right click and refresh the icon preview using mayabatch as V-Ray being the primary render. Which has been great for workflow.

The image generation is done not through a batch render command but through "maya.exe -prompt".

I simply right click on an icon and it executes $renderIcons command.

$execute= ("start maya -prompt -file "+$filetoopen+" -command modelBank_scene_prompt"); 
$renderIcons = "system(\""+$execute+"\");";

modelBank_scene_prompt contains commands like this;

setAttr -type "string" vraySettings.fileNamePrefix ($iconsPrimary + $iconsExtension);
vrend -camera persp -layer defaultRenderLayer;
print ("// Result: Successfully rendered "+$props+"'s icon.\n");

This setup has worked really well for years since around 2011, but something in 3.40.03 has broken this pipeline.

If I render in V-Ray 3.4 the scene is corrupt



However when I revert back to 3.3, V-Ray renders properly



Any ideas to what can be done?

I can confirm that even though the render appears black, it is rendering the scene and saving the image properly. It's just the scene is really corrupt (mesh won't render, lights won't render) but infinite planes render. Certainly is a strange one.

V-Ray 3.3 is fine.

[snivlem]

Think I tracked it down.

It seems strange, but for some reason in batch mode without a UI, V-Ray proxies don't have a bounding box. Because this is what causes it

select -r -visible `ls -type mesh`;
viewFit -f 1 perspShape;

These commands are zooming inside of the Vrmesh which is what caused the corruption of render. Reverting back to 3.3 and it frames the object perfectly. There you go!

Edit: If anyone else from the future stumbles upon this thread, then all you have to do is Swith the parameter "Geometry to load" from any setting to Maya Mesh, then Maya can do viewFit on it. Solved!

[ydm]

Great feedback!

Thanks for taking the time to investigate the problem!

It's a good thing you found a solution, but this is still a bug and we'll update you once it's fixed.

Regards!
Yordan

[ydm]

Hello again!

We actually skip some computations in batch mode for performance purposes.

Setting the VRAY_FOR_MAYA_BATCH_PREVIEWS environment variable to the value of 1 disables these optimizations.

Can you please check if this solves your problem?

[snivlem]

Thank you, I am very happy with this solution. Appreciate it.