Maya Batch Render

V-Ray for Maya V-Ray for Maya :: Issues
1

Is the correct way to batch render a single scene with some render layers done by going to to the Render Menu and select Batch Render?

I try this and all my renders are of the first frame of each layer!

I’ve selected Standard in the Vray Animation area and set my frames. I’ve also tried it with checking/unchecking the Don’t save image (ignored in batch mode) and Render animation only in batch mode.

Please help!

Rendering works fine by just hitting the teapot icon in the VFB but I would like to also use batch render.

I’m using Maya 2014 and Vray 3.10

2

you don’t need to use maya batch render from ui, if you want to render animation. You can check in your render view - render all layers, then go to common tab and enable animation specify your frame range make sure render animation in batch mode only is off and simply hit maya’s render current frame button, vray then will render the entire animation for each enabled render layer.

3

I’ve been doing this via the VFB. Should I be doing it using Maya’s Render View?

Also, I’ve been rendering on scenes on co-workers computers (we don’t have a network render system setup yet) and random JPEG/PNG sequences are corrupted when I bring them into After Effects. I was using TIFF files but they were too large for our storage so I went to PNG and then JPEG (we are not doing any complex compositing so I don’t need 32 bit EXR files or files like that).

Could it be that Maya/Vray just don’t like outputting JPEG/PNG files?

4

You can use vray’s render button it’s essentially the same thing.

Jpeg, or other formats should be just fine. Its sounds like a different problem though.

5

Batch rendering from the Rendering menu should work just fine. Are you getting any errors in the output window or the script editor ? Can you also check for errors in the mayaRenderLog.txt (usually in Documents/maya)? You can just delete this file, then do a batch render and maya will create it again, so it will contain a log only for the last render.

And another thing - can you try and do a command-line batch render and see if that fails too?

6

I get no errors. Every frame that is rendered in batch mode is the first frame of the animation.

How do I do a command line batch render?

7

On windows, you should open a command prompt (type “cmd” in the start menu’s search) and type the full path to Render.exe, usually in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya<version>\bin\Render.exe -r vray <path to scene>.

Can you send us a scene to see what’s wrong?

8

I figured out what was wrong. I hadn’t set my render camera in the render settings area. :sweat_smile:

Thanks for the tip on command line batch rendering.

If I may ask one other thing. Is there an easy way to set up batch rendering for V-Ray so that I can queue multiple scenes to render?

9

You can either use some sort of render management (backburner, deadline, etc), or make a windows batch script that renders all .ma files within a folder, or simply open a text editor, and on type in the same cmd line I mentioned for every scene, then save as .bat. In this case you’ll have, say:
C:\…\render.exe -r vray <scene1>.ma
C:\…\render.exe -r vray <scene2>.ma

and so on

10

That command line batch way works great. Thanks!