Rendering using Batch Rendering
Contents
Introduction
Most people use the rendering function that is embedded in Maya. Just press the Render current frame button and watch the image being rendered. There are some important limitations or drawbacks however:
- Render Current Frame can only render one image at a time. Animations cannot be rendered.
- Using the built-in rendering command in Maya limits the amount of available memory [1]
Preparation
- Make sure your Project is set
- Check your Render Settings
Rendering an image sequence
When your aim is to render a sequence of images, e.g. for an animation, be sure to make the proper settings.
Especially pay attention to:
- File name prefix
- default may be fine, but you may want to use a custom prefix.
- Frame/Animation ext
- is most commonly set to name.#.ext or name_#.ext
- Image format
- for animations, Targa (tga) is recommended as it works well with software such as Adobe Premiere.
- Start / End frame
- make sure the correct start and end frame are set for the sequence.
- Frame padding
- most commonly set to 4, to have 4-digit numbering.
- Renderable Camera
- Select the camera that should be rendered.
Starting the Batch rendering process
In the Rendering menu-set, choose Render > Batch Render.
This will start the rendering process in the background in a separate process. Once it runs you may close Maya, which may greatly improve the amount of free memory that is available for rendering.
Getting the results
De Batch render process will write the results into the images folder of your project.
Stopping a running Batch render
This must be done using the Task Manager (in Windows).
Press Ctrl + Alt + Del and click Task Manager. Go to the processes tab and find the mayabatch.exe process:
Select the mayabatch.exe process from the list. You may click End Process to kill it:
References
- ↑ On 32bits Windows platforms, the amount of memory any single process can use, is limited. When rendering in Maya, this is shared with the main Maya process itself, which may take up to 1Gigabyte on heavy scenes, thus leaving little memory for the rendering process.
