Introduction to Maya - Modeling Fundamentals Vol 2
This course will look in the fundamentals of modeling in Maya with an emphasis on creating good topology. It's aimed at people that have some modeling experience in Maya but are having trouble with complex objects.
# 1 21-06-2012 , 09:08 PM
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Join Date: Jun 2011
Posts: 17

Batch render different frames into different directories

I just want to automate this with mel. I thought "How hard could it be?"... HA!

I just to make a mel script that will:
render frames 1-10 into images\chunk01\name.1.png thru name.10.png
render frames 11-20 into images\chunk02\name.1.png thru name.10.png
render frames 21-30 into images\chunk03\name.1.png thru name.10.png
... you get the idea.

Note that I want each directory (images\chunknn) to contain 10 frames that are renumbered from 1 to 10 each time. Here's what I do NOT want...

images\chunk01\name.1.png thru name.10.png
images\chunk02\name.11.png thru name.20.png
images\chunk03\name.21.png thru name.30.png

Multiple problems I've run into so far:

"batchRender" doesn't give me any way to specify which frames I want rendered.
"render" doesn't give me the control I need either. I've found examples all over the internet like "render -s 10 -e 20", but maya 2011 doesn't recognize the -s or -e flags.

I've tried many other techniques as well to no avail. To keep this post as short as possible, I'll omit them for now.

Am I making this more complicated than it really is?? How would you do it?

user added image

# 2 22-06-2012 , 06:01 PM
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Join Date: Jun 2011
Posts: 17

SOLVED!!

I found a way! So in my initial inquiry I mentioned that -s and -e don't work in maya 2011... Well I suppose that's because I was trying those flags by calling 'render' from within Maya's Script Editor. After some digging, I came to realize that they were talking about the render command executable that can be found in "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2011\bin" (or where ever you installed maya).

Sooo...
1) I added C:\Progra~1\Autodesk\Maya2011\bin to my path. (Note that I used the '~1' version of the name, not the "Program Files" version. The space will confuse render.exe...)
2) Now I can use render.exe from the command line! Like this:

render -r sw -im myName -of png -s 1 -e 10 -b 1 -pad 4 -rd images\chunk01 scenes\myScene.ma

3) Which means that I can write a windows batch script to do what I want! user added image Like this:

render -r sw -im myName -of png -s 1 -e 10 -b 1 -pad 4 -rd images\chunk01 scenes\myScene.ma
render -r sw -im myName -of png -s 11 -e 20 -b 1 -pad 4 -rd images\chunk02 scenes\myScene.ma
render -r sw -im myName -of png -s 21 -e 30 -b 1 -pad 4 -rd images\chunk03 scenes\myScene.ma


...or I could use a 'for' loop.

For a description of what the different flags are, go to Maya Help (from within maya or at autodesk.com), and navigate to User Guide > Rendering and Render Setup > Rendering Utilities > Rendering Utilities Tools > Common flags for the command line renderer

Hope this helps someone!
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