this may seem a little stupid, i cant make an avi
 

This may seem very stupid to you guys but i cant seem to make an avi, i went into render globles and set the file name as "gametest" set the next line to name.#.ext started at frame 1 and ended at frame 40 and selected avi as my file type with RGB and the one below it checked, i closed the windo then clicked batch render . the command line says its starting the batch render , 0 percent complete. then 4 seconds later it says complete but no file made. can anyone help? :banghead:

its worse than i thought, i cant render anything with batch render for that scene, i tried a test on another scene and it worked,. anyone know whats wrong?

When that happens, there are a couple of things you can try.

First, make sure your file is saved and then go to File> Optimize Scene Size. If it still doesn't work, another thing that I've seen done that works, is to Select everything and then go to File > Export Selected. Export everything into a new file and try to render in the new file.

If it still doesn't work, I'm not sure what the problem might be.

Mtmchinley, your good, thanks. I did an export and retried, worked like a charm. Im gonna drink a beer in your honor... thanks. :beer:

I have the same problem and both your suggestions didn't work. Maybe it's because i cant batch render any of my files.

Do you now of anywhere i can go to solve the problem

thanx

looooooooool!!!!! ive ben studying maya on and off for like 8 months now and i still cant make an avi as well :-) i guess im mpre stupid hehehehe!

you could always batch render to an avi (i think that works) just set the file type in render globals to avi and ur time range

the only problem with doing that is the quality isn't very good, and if you have any problems and need to cancel the batch render, you lose the entire file...

What do you mean the quality isn't very good? Do you mean a batch rendered image won't look as good as a normal render? Or do you mean maya doesn't create very good looking AVIs in general? In that case I'm guessing you prefer to render each image to a separate file and use an external program to create an avi from those image files?

What I do is render everything in IFF files and then put them together in AfterEffects and output it as a AVI and that works well

-Emo

Mike has a great tutorial on setting up for rendering (render globals). I've used his TGA->VideoMach method for a few weeks and I agree with him that the AVI output using this method is much much higher.

Here's the tut

Where can we download afterEffect? Does that mean the program can use all the iff files and make them into avi files?

I'm not absolutely positive, but AfterEffects is a pretty expensive program to purchase, and as far as I know there are no evaluation versions out there. But yes, you can use it to take a sequence of still images and output them to an AVI.

for that purpose, VideoMach is just as good