[abed-sabeh]

Hi,

I can't batch render in maya (7.0 & 8.0) am I doing something wrong?

[3dtrialpractice]

hey,

can you explain the steps that you go thru to load up maya .. create your scene and start up a batch render ((i'm assuming batch render with maxwell) If you have not seen Mike Vertas videos definatly check those out too.
http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... hp?t=20214
It definatly has been workin for me with maya8 -weve batched off over 1000 frames and its workin great.

-luke

[Neil Evans]

Luke

You managed to batch off 1000 frames using Maya 8, I can't get it to go past 20 before it bombs out. I was told it was a memory leak issue. Was it a bit file you were rendering? Maybe it was that, our testfile was generating mxs files of 2.5gb..

[abed-sabeh]

well, it's working fine now.
Thanks

[Neil Evans]

Which version? Has there been a new release?

[3dtrialpractice]

neil,

wow ya 2.5 gb files are big.. hah.. We had one thing that had to be quick so it was just a truck and a skeleton geo.. so the mxs file was only 25 megs. and I batched it in "pools" of 100 frames each- so that i could kill any processes that were going on after a 100 frames and then start another 100 frames(and i did setup on multiple macines cuz of time crunch.).. becasue I had read your post about the memory leak in another thread.so i wanted to avoid being suprised by it not finishing a packet. ..took a day and a night and I was only going to 9 samples.. quick outdoor scene.

[Neil Evans]

Yep and it is not all that complicated. It is the planting, I need to find a solution.

I guess that the memory leak on 25meg will be less than one the 2.5gb hence the reason you can render more frames. The only way I have found to get big animations out is export the mxs files and use renderpal. Just had to buy an terrabyte hard drive to get the files on!! Fingers crossed the new plugin will have fixed this..

[Boris Ulzibat]

Yep and it is not all that complicated. It is the planting, I need to find a solution.

I guess that the memory leak on 25meg will be less than one the 2.5gb hence the reason you can render more frames. The only way I have found to get big animations out is export the mxs files and use renderpal. Just had to buy an terrabyte hard drive to get the files on!! Fingers crossed the new plugin will have fixed this..

Why not use the MXCL to manage animation rendering?
It can do it very good!
Provided you already have all frames exported to MXS.

[Neil Evans]

Interesting, how would I do it? Would I need to do have a batch file for each machine? That would be a pain to have to fire it up on each box...

[Boris Ulzibat]

Interesting, how would I do it? Would I need to do have a batch file for each machine? That would be a pain to have to fire it up on each box...

You need no batch file at all!
Just save the MXS files to netword drive (i guess you are already doing it)
Load MXCL on every machine open the first MXS and specify the frame range for each of the machines in the bottom right corner of "render options" tab in MXCL.
The frames then will be rendered automatically.
Is it a solution for you?

[Neil Evans]

Ok, thanks for that. It is a solution but I have enough machines for that to become a bit of a pain. It would be great to be able to manage the files from one machine rather than have to mess around opening each machine etc etc. Maybe the next release will have this function. Until then I guess I am going to have to coin out for renderpal.

[3dtrialpractice]

yo.. check it out looks like a new MAYA plugin is available!!
and they fixed the mxs memory leak too it looks like!!
thanks Next limit maya plugin team!!

[3dtrialpractice]

Hello.

As noted on the front page, a new version of the plug-in is available. The changes are:

Version 1.0.15 (revision 244)
------------------------------

Features:
- 64-bit support on Windows
- MXS files are now saved to a temporary directory when doing a batch render. This is needed when doing a network render
- the plug-in no longer adds per-object caustics attributes since the renderer won't support them anyway. Please note
that the attributes will still be there for objects that have been seen by the plug-in already.
- material editor rollups (layers, BSDF etc.) are now expanded by default
- added an update notification mechanism. The plug-in checks if a newer version is available when it is loaded. Automatic
checks can be disabled in the Maxwell preferences dialog. There's also a button there that can be used to manually
check for updates.
- the plug-in now shows up in Add/Remove programs and it can be uninstalled from there.
- all the image based lighting channels are enabled by default now (but IBL itself is still off, scenes still use physical
sky by default)

Bugs:
- fixed memory leak during animation export
- the Nd for the AGS material preset was erroneously set to 3 (it has to be 1)
- using motion blur on scenes containing objects with geometry that varies with time (e.g. growing PaintFX) was not possible.
Motion blur is now disabled automatically only for those objects.

Happy holidays,
Mihnea

[Neil Evans]

Yep amazing, nice one guys!! Going to test it now.

[Neil Evans]

Ran some test last night, the memory leak seems to be fixed I have one question though, how does your batch render work? I have tried using virtual vertex to render an animation using there Maya unified render solution but I get an error message :-

Warning: Renderer "maxwell" does not provide a command line interface.

Is this a VV problem or something to do with the way maxwell sets off the batch renders?

Cheers

Neil