Command line rendering and render queues in Maya

One little nifty trick one can do is to use the command line renderer that ships with maya. Or rather: When you start the Batch render -process from within maya, you are actually starting a separate process. Thing is, you can start this process from outside of maya, using just the command prompt. There are some advantages to this, two of these are
- Not having to spend system resources on Maya itself, the renders are slightly faster
- With a simple trick, you can put multiple scenes on queue.

The basics are simple, just open a command prompt from windows (or open the Maya Terminal in OSX). type Render myscene.mb.

Now, there are many flags you can set when using this command, but if everything is set in maya, that is all there is to it. Some other useful flags follow here:

-x int and -y int : The resolution of the Render
-s int and -e int: The starting frame and the last frame of the render
-rd : output directory
-im : output image file name

Render Queue

In windows, you have something called batch-files. These are text files that can contain several command prompt commands. For instance, you can create a file called myRenders.bat. In it you have two lines
Render scene1.mb
Render scene2.mb

When you run the batch-file (double click it or type myRenders.bat in the command prompt, the two commands will run after each other. In this case, you will render out first scene1 and then scene2.
This is useful if you have multiple scenes you want to render overnight. Just type a number of Render-commands in a batch file and you are ready to go.

With the use of flags, you can make multiple renders of the same scene as well. For instance, it would be easy to make a batch-file that did both the entire scenes, and also rendered out a particular frame from each scene in higher resolution (if you would want something like that.)

New book on Renderman

Two days ago I recieved a book I ordered. It's called The Renderman Shading Language Guide and is a thorough introduction to shader programming using the Renderman Shading Language.

So far it seems very good, although it focuses perhaps a bit to much on peripheral things like how to put up a good development environment rather than the actual programming. With that said, however, it seems like it goes into a great depth on shader programming. I will return with a more exhaustive review when I have read it through.

The official site of the book

3Delight - A high-end production Renderman renderer

I have been interested and fascinated by the Renderman renderer for quite some time now. It has, however, been slightly out of my reach due to it's costs. After looking at some of the open-source solutions out there I finally found the 3Delight engine. It's a profesional Renderman compliant engine that is used in high-end productions. It also integrates with Maya and XSI.

The cool thing is that they let you use the first license for free, including for commercial use. I have recently downloaded it and done some simple tests. I will return with more info and tips when I get more experience with it.

If you want to try it out for yourselves, the link is www.3delight.com