Batch render problems
 

Hi,

I'm trying to render some water (I know it's not totally there yet) but I'm using Maya 2008 unlimited with realflow and am having problems with batch rendering as illustrated below. My material is a blinn housing two mental ray custom shaders: one dialectric material shader and the same dialectric in the photon shader slot. I also have a sphere around my water object mapped with an hdri and a dark grey ground plane with primary visibility off.

Right. Rendering a single frame with mental ray:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v5...goodrender.jpg

Wrong. Using batch render with same render settings creates this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v5.../badrender.jpg

Not sure why this is happening as I'm not changing the render settings.

thanks for any help

Are you modifying the render settings as far as what you need for a batch render? Because (and I'm assuming you're rendering multiple frames) you have to define from which frame-which frame you want to render, where to render to, et cetera, in the global render settings.

If you're not rendering multiple frames, then there's some use for batch render other than that which I have not yet discovered. (It's quite possible =p)

Re: Batch render problems
 

Are you batch rendering with maya closed or open? I had a similar issue when rendering from the command line or by right clicking on the file. I think it may be that maya is not finding the textures so is rendering to dark/black (that's what happened to me).

I'm not sure what caused it though it may be related to file names (do you have any spaces in them?).

Sorry I can't help more.

cheers

gubar

I'm not batch rendering from the command line, still don't know the syntax.. I'm on a Mac now so I'm thinking it's something like

maya -render mr [scene file] ?


I think you may be right gubar about not finding the hdri i have mapped to my sphere, but I've set the project to the correct dir and it works when I render a single image by the render button above the shelf. It's something screwy happening with batch rendering (need to render 600 frames).

Maybe this helps?

I've been going through just about every render setting and when I unchecked
"Enable Default Light" it rendered incorrectly like the "Wrong" image above. But when I checked it, it rendered correctly. Maybe the maya batch render is unchecking or not recognizing this option somehow?