Technical question: Maya batch render (please help if you can)

[CaptainInsano]

I am going psychotic over this. I have spent HOURS and HOURS trying to fix this. It won't render out an animation!

I would really, really appreicate any help with this. I"ve posted this same question on cgtalk and 10second club as well.

All my render settings are good to go... no problems here....

render using: Maya software
Frame/Animation Ext: name.#.ext
Start Frame: 1
End frame: 300
Image Format: tiff

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v678/ParkerD/help01.jpg

*select* batch render

It message bar says:
It is rendering. I let it "render" for about half an hour....

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v678/ParkerD/help02.jpg


When I check the render process... it says:
No image can be found.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v678/ParkerD/help03.jpg

How do I batch render out an animation??:O

what the hell?! ARGH!!!!! :frustrated:

[timpaatkins]

Have you tried just rendering out one frame? What happens?

[bloodsling]

What are the settings on your common utilities? I had this problem as well and seemed to correct when I set the finished render for an avi format

[bloodsling]

What are the settings on your common utilities? I had this problem as well and seemed to correct when I set the finished render for an avi format

[CaptainInsano]

tim,
I can render out just one frame with a regular screen render (not a batch render) just fine. No problems. But it won't *batch* render, which I need to do to render out a series of frames.

bloodsling,
When I render out as an avi, it will rneder out only the first frame, even though I have it set to render 300 frames. It also renders it out at this really odd, birds-eye view (so the character is very far and tiny), even though I have the render settings set to render it out at perspective camera which is the angle you see in the screen grabs.

I've sent my file to 2 of my friends and it rendered out without any problems on their computers. I think the problem may be with my anti-virus software that may automatically prevent a Batch Render because it thinks it's a virus installing itself on the computer.

I've tried disabling Norton Anti-Virus, but there's no option to disable it. I don't want to just erase it from my drive, since it's come in handy a couple of times.

[Mike Frank]

It also renders it out at this really odd, birds-eye view (so the character is very far and tiny), even though I have the render settings set to render it out at perspective camera which is the angle you see in the screen grabs.

This problem is fairly typical.. usually its because there is more than one camera set as "renderable". From the sounds of it, its rendering your top view ortho camera, make sure its renderable flag is off in its attributes. (Really you should use a camera that you made for rendering.. not a default camera. ) Its been awhile for maya for me so I'm gonna go play with it and see if I can't help ya out.

Some quick ideas - your file or small portion of your HD could be slightly corrupted. Copy and paste the scene file to a new location and use the new file. Also, make sure you have write access to the place you're saving the images to. The batch render should also give you status on the frames its rendering. Yours looks like its just not starting at all. I remember a few people at college who just gave up and rendered everything by hand a few times.. definitely sucks though. There is a diagnostic tool that might help you Render -> Render Diagnostic . 3d programs man, they're really touchy about stuff.. it really could be a number of different things. Oh yeah and also check out your mayaRenderLog.txt .. it might have some info.

[Silvertone]

Some_Guy is right about the camera. Create another camera and name it renderCam or somethin. Make sure that is the Camera selected in the render globals.

Your screen shot is different than what you typed in. The screenshot says the startframe is 0.000 not 1.000.

Also it looks like your frame padding is set to 2 when it should be 3, from looking at the screenshot. Can't really see it exactly though.

Are you using alpha channels? If not uncheck it.

Try using targas [tga] in the image format.

Oh yeah, use name#.ext instead of name.#.ext

Maybe try a startframe of 1.000 and endframe of 30.000 with a frame padding of 2. If everything is working then go ahead with the full 1 - 300 batch render.

Hope that helps some.

[CaptainInsano]

thanks for the feedback everyone.

Some_Guy & Silvertone
I've put a renderable camera and set the render globe to camera01. I've also changed the frame padding to "3" and tried to render out at different image formats.

I think the problem doesn't lie with the render settings. When I render out at .iff, I can't open the image file at all. Wtih AVI it only render's the first frame instead of the whole timeline (and it still won't play the video of the 1 frame). When I render at TIFF, it only renders a blank white frame. When I use F-Check it just says "broken pipeline" and automatically closes.

It's weird. It renders just fine with my friends computers. No problems at all. But when I do it on my computer, it seriously F's up. I think it has something to do with my computer rather than the program.

Maybe someone out there might know why it renders on my friends computers but not my computer.... :\

[Mike Frank]

If you really think it might be your comp, easy way to tell would be make a new scene file. Do like 10 frames of a ball bounce and see if it comes out.

[CaptainInsano]

I've made some progress today!

When I render out as IFF, and open the image the in F-Check, it's rendered out nicely. However, the left half of the render is completely black, so I only see the right half of the animation.

I tried rendering out the ball, using IFF and opening the animation in F-Check. It works half-way. It cuts off half of the render.

Thanks again for everyone who is trying to help me. This thing has been driving me nuts.

EDIT: I GOT IT WORKING!!!! Thanks to evryone who helped out!!!!!!

[Silvertone]

So what the heck was the problem??

in case it ever happens to me!

[CaptainInsano]

Silverstone,

The problem was that there was never really not a problem at all!

What was happening is that when I batch rendered an AVI, it won't PLAY the AVI until the entire timeline was finished rendering. I would let it render for an hour, check the AVI, think that nothing has been rendered, and start over. What it was actually doing was indeed rendering the AVI... but REALLY slowly (I'm talking 15 minutes for a single frame).

When I batch rendered TIFF's or IFF's, it only displayed half of the image because it was still in the PROCESS of rendering that image... but I didn't know any better so I assumed it was only rendering half the image!

Ultimately, my computer still wasn't batch rendering out because it's too slow! It still won't batch render (at a reasonable speed)... no matter what. My desktop computer goes only 1 GHZ (it would have taken 2 days just to render out a 300 frame animation)... but it has 2 Gigs of Ram so I can have multiple programs open at once without slowdown. But when it comes to batch rendering, the lack of ghz's made render slow as molassases.

Luckily, I have a laptop computer that goes 3 GhZ (but only has 512 ram), so I just rendered it out on my laptop with NO PROBLEMS! Why the heck didn't I just think of that earlier?!

So if you get the same problem, it's that your desktop computer doesn't have enough ghz's to render it out fast or update the render process fast enough. Just render it out on a faster computer. I was lucky and happen to have a laptop that could.

UNFORTUNATELY... I have another problem. I can't export my animation with sound because it creates these random black pixels all over the animation (using premiere)!! If I use an MPEG converter, it creates this weird "ghosting" effect where you can see 5 frames ahead and 5 frames before of the frame that it's playing. So it's STILL driving me nuts!

[stine]

ooooh, i know what you're talking about... :)
sorry, didn't see your thread earlier...
i had the same problem, only that i don't have a fast laptop and so my poor computer had to render 5 days in a row, 24 hours a day... and started making funny sounds...

but what's that with the sound? i rendered the iff-sequence in maya and then put the sound in after effects. probably totally wrong, but it worked in my case cause my soundtrack was pretty simple...