Challenges upon hurdles upon challenges.. some Maya problems and solutions

This post will be to document the problems I ran into so far, and the fixes that worked for me.

Maya Batch Render is Slow, use Terminal Rendering Instead

Having Maya open while rendering is a waste of memory, it makes your batch renders slower. Maya opens up a separate program just to render the scene anyway, so its better to render with terminal.

How to do it:

1. Make sure all your render settings are good to go in Maya, then close Maya
2. Open Maya Terminal in Applications/Autodesk/maya2010/Maya Terminal
3. Open “Apple QMaster” in Applications
4. Find where it says “Command” with a little dropdown beside it, and select Maya
5. Press the + button
6. copy and paste this into the first text field: /Applications/Autodesk/maya2010/Maya.app/Contents/bin/Render
7. Click “Choose…” for Project and Scene File. Your project is the folder that contains your Maya Project, and Scene file is the .mb file
8. Set the starting and ending frames how you want under Frames
9. Uncheck Motion Blur (unless you want it, but its really slow)
10. (required to use both processors in your computer) Add the following in the Command text area beside the other commands with dashes, makes sure there is a space on either side of it: -n 0
11. copy the text QMaster generated for you in “Command”
12. Paste that text into Maya Terminal, and hit enter. It should be rendering away.

So it sounds terribly complicated, but its really worth avoiding the headaches of batch render and isn’t all that bad after you’ve gone through it a couple times. Plus, it renders faster.

When working with a large scene, use layers a lot

In this project I had 3 areas each with multiple rooms. I put each room on a separate display layer so I could hide the one I wasn’t working on. I also made sure to put each room’s lights on a separate layer so I could disable the lights, speeding up render times.

When you do preview renders, set the quality to “Preview Quality”

You don’t need perfect quality to see what a scene will look like when its rendered out. Set the resolution to 1/2 of what your final output will be and use preview quality in render settings. Rendering full quality for previews is a time sink.

Use depth map shadows whenever possible

Raytrace shadows look amazing but take forever in an animation. I was hitting 10+ minutes per frame with them, whereas in my final sequence I used depth map shadows which took 1-2 minutes a frame.

Try out both Maya Software and Mental Ray rendering engines

You can switch the render in your render settings. By default it’s set to Maya Software. I found Maya Software to render my textures crisper than Mental Ray, but Mental Ray often rendered faster. The only time Maya Software rendered faster was with many (15) depth map shadows. For render settings, I used production quality, but changed the multipixel filter to 1.4 to make the renders sharper.

Set Reflections To 1 or 2

In large scenes, if reflections are set to 10 for example, the reflection will bounce back and forth 10 times, which is slow. 1 or 2 will usually look good enough.

Lower the Texture Filter setting

In each texture with an image, set the Filter property to around 0.125. Default is 1.00, which makes textures fuzzy. Unfortunately mental ray seems to ignore this, but it works for Maya Software.

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That’s all I can think of at the moment, hope it helps anyone who comes across the same problems.