maximum number of renderlayers?

# 1 20-10-2011 , 02:46 PM

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Location: vienna

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Ahoi!

Does anyone know how many renderLayers maya can handle in one scene file?

(speaking about 800-1600 renderlayers)

maya2011 btw

thx in advance!

everything starts and ends in the right place at the right time.

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# 2 20-10-2011 , 03:36 PM

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Not 100% sure, but I dont think there is a limit as such. Its what your rig can handle that counts... I am sure the help files will have something about this.

Chris (formerly R@nSiD)
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# 3 20-10-2011 , 04:22 PM

Lead Modeler - Framestore
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LOL really, dude thats just insane. What is it for??

I would say Maya could do it, the only thing would be to Name the layers to stay organised, but having to scroll thru that lot to adjust primary visibilites etc is a bit over the top.

But please enlighten me as to what you are doing. I looked in the help for this but as ever nada!!....could be a question to pose on the Area or even the Autodesk mob

Jay

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# 4 20-10-2011 , 05:19 PM

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If your machine can handle it than sure it should be possible but I can't see a single reason why anyone would ever need 800+ renderLayers seems insane!

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# 5 20-10-2011 , 05:37 PM

Lead Modeler - Framestore
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Yeah just a bit, cant think of anytime in a studio or otherwise where that amount was ever required....how would a comp package handle this amount of images too?? Are they limited as well??

Jay

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# 6 20-10-2011 , 06:04 PM

SM Tea Boy
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I think 1600 images per frame to comp might be a bit much, imagine 32 bit images at 50 mb a go that's about 80Gb per frame, 10 seconds of animation at 30fps would take up 24 terabytes of space!!! say you cram 5 - 1.5 TB drives in a machine that's 7.5TB you'd need 4 machines just to handle the storage lol

I think it would be possible but it does seem a bit impractical.

Dave

From a readers' Q and A column in TV GUIDE: "If we get involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes?"

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# 7 20-10-2011 , 06:06 PM

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PS: it´s 8bit and a lot of transparency.

thx for your interest guys. insane is a good description of my situation.

find some background info there -> https://simplymaya.com/forum/showthread.php?t=36044

working on renderings for an online configurator. some 400.000 renderings atm. things are constantly shifting, so could be a little less or some 100.000 renderings more. started with the layersystem today, 4 days left until deadline. but for now, I don´t care about deadlines anymore... around 1000 single geometries to render with 3 different cameras with 210 different textures each time. a single final onlineView will be composed of about 20 layers at a time. each geometry must drop shadows correctly onto its layer below, and of course everything has to fit everything. I sucked at combinational logic at highSchool, but it´s part of the game now.

I kept the naming convention as clean as possible. the final renderings but must be named like:

texture_camera_sdfasf_assdf_asdrewrtwg_erggrewgt_g erw2_wergwegwg_wgwrtgw_w44h6_w4r4th4h56_gh45w5_53t g54gt45_4g5wtg_wrgweg.something

so the configuration can pick the right stuff from the rendering pool. I dropped the idea to name the layers right in maya. it will be done afterwards with a java script batch renaming tool which a working mate will create for me. we have a html list of itemNames_maya vs itemNames_client. in maya I am working with nameSelection alot. also, Outliner <DAG Objects Only> unchecked is your friend, which makes the (re)naming of renderLayers not such a pain in the ass. after some 100 layers a bug kicks in which doesn´t let you scroll the layerPanel, but it´s fine again after restart and as long as you don´t rename layers.

since I use mentalRay + HDRI + FG I needed to devide the lighting and shadows with maya´s useBackgroundShader, which of course only collects real-light shadows. so I turned on IBL emit light, which ofc is also a broken feature since 2010 I think. but the bug only kicks in after 7x7 samples (default is 256x256). then renderperformance is going down to hell. so I use the low numbers, still doesn´t look too bad. useBackground at least makes use now of the HDRI as a real light source.

To not confuse maya too much with overrides (assigning different shaders hundreds of times to same objects) I duplicated backGround-shaded only geometries from the rendered ones. because maya´s renderLayer system can be a heck at times..

I´ll post a link of the configurator once it is online.

everything starts and ends in the right place at the right time.

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# 8 21-10-2011 , 07:44 AM

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referencing renderLayers

hey guys,

is anyone experienced with referencing? never done it and just read through the help files, which actually where not much help for that purpose.

I thought about creating all render layers in the originalFile and reference them partially into smaller renderFiles, because I need to region render different areas multiple times.

just tried to create an unlocked reference, but still I can´t edit anything because -> can´t edit locked nodes. on the other hand in the Ref Editor it is only possible to lock stuff, not unlock.. for some funny reason when learning new stuff within maya, at first everything appears uposide down to me.

any good tutorials out there on how to reference renderLayers, or the whole scene but just load specific renderlayers?

thx!

everything starts and ends in the right place at the right time.

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# 9 21-10-2011 , 09:30 AM

Lead Modeler - Framestore
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I have had experience of referencing....You should be able to lock it in the ref editor.
If the file was on a layer in the normal scene then that layer should in theory come in as part of the ref anyway

Select the objects name in the ref editor then go to reference>Lock Reference. The Reference will have a Lock Icon attached to it in the Ref editor. You can unlock anytime

If at any time you dont want it as a ref for what ever reason you can convert to an object in the ref editor by going to file>import objects from reference, this will turn them to 'normal' object again.

You can tell if its a ref object or not in the Outliner as a reference object has a small blue sphere icon attached to it a standard object doesnt

hope this helps

Jay

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# 10 21-10-2011 , 10:43 AM

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man, that sounds like a really depressing job. user added image

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# 11 21-10-2011 , 12:20 PM

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thx Jay for your input. I might try to convert references later on. sounds interesting. what did not work was referencing only specific layers. everything comes with namespaces which is a heck, since I read there

https://www.toadstorm.com/blog/?p=26

about having same layers in an empty scene. but the others come with namespaces again and thats not what I need.

I guess I´ll just reference the geometry into single renderScenes with only the renderLayers I need. Is there any possibility to not have namespaces while referencing? because I already have a clean and uniformely named scene. maya somehow doesn´t let me create a reference without namespace or string. maya also denies to let me select scene content. I didn´t lock anything so far. but anyway. I think it´s just because I am new to references. nothing makes sense realy atm. but I´ll figure that out.

and yes, it is kind of depressing. a super-computerbrain would come in realy hand right now..

everything starts and ends in the right place at the right time.

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