Hi guys, I am looking at ways to setup batch rendering animation done in vray for Maya with Deadline. Here is a post I did in the Vray beta board. Vlado re-directed me to you because he knows that you have a lot of experience with vray and Deadline… here is a copy of the post. What do you think?
ME:
[i]Hi Vlado, I have a question regarding the GI map creation.
We always render all our flythrough animation on a render farm, each machine rendering 1 frame (not using DR), I am using Deadline for distributed rendering. Here is how I am setup in Mental Ray, I would like to know if it is possible to do the same with Vray.
In Mental ray, when using Photons and Final gather, I have this submitter script that submit 2 jobs, the first creating the FG map (not rendering the image), I call this the fgMake job. The second job reads the FG map and render the image, i call that the fgRead job.
For the fgMake job, I only render a few key frame (usually rendering every 10 frame or so)
This job can run on any machines, although only one machine a a time is allowed to render a frame of the fgMake job. At render time mental ray read the fgmap and append points to it, if it doesn’t exists (usually at the first frame) the map gets created and saved to disk automatically.
So in short the user don’t have to create a fg map in the UI, and save it manually… all this is done automatically… I like to call this fire and forget rendering
In Vray, looking at the map options or light cache and Irradiance map, it looks like it is hard to have vray create a map on disk, read it and append to it automatically. All the option seems to rely on having a map in memory… For example the Incremental add to current map doesn’t allow me to link a map file to load before appending to it…
Do you think it is possible to have a similar setup with vray?
[/i]
VLADO:
[i]You would do something very similar:
-
You create one job that renders the animation every 10th frame, with the “Incremental add to irradiance map” mode; you assign the final file name in the “Auto-save” attribute for the irradiance map. The entire map must be rendered in one go as a sequence (without restarting V-Ray in between). Until recently, there was no command-line option to skip frames for the standalone, but this is now added. The Maya batch render command also supports this.
-
You can then render the final sequence using the saved map.
The guys at Frantic Films have a lot of experience with Deadline and V-Ray so you can ask them directly.
Best regards,
Vlado[/i]
ME:
[i][…]“The entire map must be rendered in one go as a sequence”[…]
I predict problems because of this. Maya in Deadline have 2 mode of render, using the maya command line (render.exe) or the mayaBatch.exe.
With Deadline, when using the mayaCommand method it is not possible to render an animation every Nth frame without restarting maya between each frame.
When using the mayabatch method it is possible but between each frame Deadline check if there is a more important job, if so the scene is closed an resumed later.
So I don’t see how this can be achieved …
i’ll check how Frantic are doing it.
[/i]
Thanks