batch render issue
 

I'm new to Maya and am trying to render my scene out to an .avi. There's a few models, a simple camera animation, and lights. I try rendering it out and the output is dark, some parts of the models turn up dark blue, and there's no movement. I must be doing something wrong, but I can't figure it out.

This is how the scene looks:
http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a3...creenshot1.jpg

This is how it looks rendered:
http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a3...creenshot2.jpg

Couple things to check... first is your face normals on your objects, either turn off 2-sided lighting to check, or turn on display face normals.
Try rendering just a single frame, with and without the lights in your scene (try using the default light to see if that's the problem).

Also, you shouldn't really render out as an avi... it's better to render out indiv frames and then combine them in something like premier or final cut or after effects or virtualdub.

Your light is not active, its grayed out for some reason, I don't know what you did to it.

Also, rendering out to avi probably isn't the best idea, they are large and heaven forbid if something happens during the rendering process, you'd have to start all over again. Also rendering out image sequences allows you to fiddle with it in post with less headache.

The file size when batch rendering to .avi and not compressing is huge. If you don't want to use any of the programs mention by stwert and want a fast result you should use some form of compresion. But i wouldn't recommand it because the quality isn't that good. I make use of aftereffect to get some good quality and not a huge file. There use to be a free tutorial on SM about Render_Movie_Globals.

Quoted for total correctness!

It was something with the light, whatever I managed to do to it...

I know .avi is huge, I'm using video 1 compression on it, but its for a class and .avi is the format they want. I asked here because the teacher wasn't much help at all.

Thanks for all the help.

Here are some things to try...

1. go to camera attributes > environment and make the background color something other then black (BTW this is one of my biggest pet peeves about posts - the default black background makes almost all renders look like crap!)

2. Add a ground plane (something as simple as a single poly plane will make a big difference). This also helps final gather.

3. For quick high quality renders I just go to the quality tab and select production fine trace and then go to the features tab and select final gather. Just use the defaults. This is assuming you are rendering in mental ray.