Sometime in your rendering, it is normal that something could go wrong, but if you follow the guidelines for sending your render project to us manually.
Scene file – should be saved in Maya 2015 – 2019. We do support .mb (Maya binary) & .ma (Maya ASCII) files. Also, we can render scenes prepared on Mac or Linux OS, however, those scenes should be saved in .ma format so we can relink all paths with to our local network drive.
Project folder – this feature should be ALWAYS used. All paths to \Prj_folder\ should be prepared and set up in the scene. There cannot be any missing assets or scene references. All scenes should be saved in \PrjFolder\scenes \. Please try to avoid textures saved in different paths than defined in Project folder settings.
Scene references – if there are any, they should be merged into one file. If Scene references cannot be merged, please be sure that all used assets have correct paths to \ProjectFolder\.
Render layers – all layers that are meant to be rendered the need to have a valid renderable camera set. We are not editing scenes & turning on/off render layers. Also file name prefix options should be prepared as “<RenderLayer>/<Camera>/<RenderPass>”;. Name suffix should be “name.#.xxx” (for eg. Scenename.0001.jpg). Any other file saving options can cause issues during network rendering & progress checking process. Please avoid name suffix with .# at the end. Image format extension should be always after frame number
Viewport & save – render camera should be selected as well in render settings and viewport. Viewport should be maximized with render cam. Shading details should be switched to “box” without any shading abilities. Please turn off any kind of GPU interactive render preview
GI setup – should be prepared for multiple machines rendering in both render engines – Mental Ray & Vray. If you are not sure about GI setup – please contact us. Arnold renderer is using “Brute Force” method, so Arnold scenes don’t have to be cached before rendering on multiple machines
Plugins – we are supporting quite a lot of Maya plugins, however, if you are using an uncommon add-on we may need some time to run a test with plugin & our network rendering system
Render specific settings – Distributed rendering, Low thread priority, Render region – should all be off (VRay render engine)
Animated textures – animation files (avi/mp4/etc) are not a valid option for animated textures, also .mov files cannot be used. Please make frame sequence (jpg\png or so) and connect the image sequence
Switches – for VRay render engine – in render settings / common tab:
“Don’t save the image (ignored in batch mode)- OFF,
“Animation” – ON (if the scene is animated, not still shot) + correct frame range set up in “start frame/end frame”.
By frame” value should be set to 1.000.
Resolution & render camera – should be selected with correct values / options.
“Use VRayFB” – ON.
Hide render view – “OFF”,
“Disable region rendering in batch mode” – OFF (if render region is not used!).
“VRay” render settings tab – “Don’t render final image” – OFF
“Indirect Illumination” – if LightCache is used, “number of LC passes” should be = 0.
“Settings” tab – “Use distributed rendering” – OFF
“Low thread priority” – OFF
MEL / Python callbacks – if the scene is not using any kind of additional MEL/Python scripts/plugins all fields should be empty
Render elements – if they are used, all of them that should be rendered should be enabled! We are not changing scene setups and if any of the render elements are missing during the rendering process, will be re-rendered & billed as separated render-job. In render elements settings – “Separate folders” switch should be OFF
Maya script editor – Please try to avoid “errors”. We are rendering using “Render.exe” – not Maya.exe or any other GUI setups so if there will be “errors” in Maya script editor – scene can cause problems with rendering. “Warning” issues in most cases are just info about non-critical issues so if they are not important we will ignore them in the rendering process. We are saving Maya log file (to .txt) in \Scene_name-log\ directory so if you want/need to check to render time & scene warnings info feel free to download these files
NAME – Scene name, asset and output paths should not contain any special characters like / \ ” % #? etc
Having a Camera that is added manually so that its name is different than default ones (sideShape, topShape, frontShape, perspShape, persp).
Having a Maya project folder with “scenes” directory that contains your scenes, for example:
N:/RenderProject <- this is the Maya project folder
N:/RenderProject/scenes <- this is the scenes directory
N:/RenderProject/scenes/shot001.mb <- the scene
if you are using XGen, the xgen directory should be directly in your project directory:
N:/RenderProject/xgen
Avoid using any special characters in your file names and paths like “@$:%^” or language-specific non-ASCII characters like Cyrillic or Korean alphabet.