Batch Render Gives Blank Frames Render View Is Fine

[pmumford]

i'm having a heap of problems rendering a particular scene i'm working on. I can preview the frame in the Render View with both Mental Ray and Software render, but when i do a batch render all my frames come out blank.

I've been trying to troubleshoot this for days checking all my uv maps, texture/material setups and mesh output settings but i cant find whats causing the issue.

Anyone have any suggestions to what could cause this discrepency between the renderview and batch output?

Thanks,

Paul

[joojaa]

What does the log say? HOw much mem does your computer have.

[pmumford]

QUOTE(Joojaa @ 10/30/06, 07:57 PM) [snapback]251096[/snapback]
What does the log say? HOw much mem does your computer have.

Hi Jooja, thanks for responding.

The log doesnt return anything abnormal :

// Result:Percentage of rendering done: 100 (/Volumes/W_I_P/3D Stag/layer1/test.tif)//
// Result:Rendering PostProcessing.//
// Result:Rendering Completed. See Console for more information.//

I checked the diagnistics in the render view too. Initially it said : StagPolyMeshOrig has no shading group associated with it. This means that it will not be rendered. Please assign it to a shading group. - it can be useful to run your scene through "maya -optimizeRender" before rendering. This can help optimize the scene for rendering.

But i played around until i fixed the shading group issue and the problem still persisted.

I've gone back to the beginning of the project and worked from the mesh up to the full rig doing a test batch at each stage - so far its working fine. But i'd really love to understand what i did wrong the first time so i can get into a good workflow.

So advice still appreciated.

BTW I'm running a Apple dualcore 2.3 ghz G5 with 4 gig of RAM. Nvidia 7800 gfx card. Maya 8.

Thanks,

Paul

[joojaa]

Not that log the mayaRenderLog.txt file OR what the renderer says when you launch it form command line, preferably both, as the batch launched form within Maya is in general not good thing to do when running renders or especially debugging them

[pmumford]

Sorry my mistake, heres the log when i run a batch from the command line [ i dont know where the render log text file is? i tried spotlight seraching but nothign came up]

:
QUOTE
Dave:~ blunt$ render -r sw /Volumes/Dave_Proj/Paul/3D/Stag/test.ma

Starting "/Applications/Alias/maya8.0/Maya.app/Contents/bin/maya"

mental ray for Maya 8.0
mental ray: version 3.5.1.2, 15 Jun 2006, revision 18552
mental ray: mental ray for Maya - startup done
Hardware Renderer : vendor(NVIDIA Corporation), renderer(NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT OpenGL Engine), version(1.5 NVIDIA-1.4.18)
fragment API(NVIDIA Cg)
vertex API(Cg vertex programs)
Cg fragment profile(arbfp1), vertex profile(arbvp1)
File read in 1 seconds.
Result: /Volumes/Dave_Proj/Paul/Torrents/3D Stag/test.ma
Total Elapsed Time Since Start Of Maya (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:14
====================================
Resource Usage At Start Of Rendering

A default light has been created, modify defaultRenderGlobals.enableDefaultLight to change this behavior.
A default light named "defaultLight" has been added to the scene for Fur rendering.
Starting Rendering /Users/blunt/Desktop/layer1/help911.tif.
Constructing shading groups.
Rendering current frame.
Frame triangle count: 0
====================================

Resource Usage At End Of Frame

Postprocessing rendering result.
Time For Tessellation (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:00

Time For Shadow Map (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:00

Time For Post Process (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:00

Time For Frame Render (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:00

Finished Rendering /Users/blunt/Desktop/layer1/help911.tif.

====================================
Resource Usage At End Of Rendering

Total Time For Render (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:00

Total Elapsed Time For Maya (hh:mm:ss): 00:00:14

Scene /Volumes/Dave_Proj/Paul/Torrents/3D Stag/test.ma completed.
mental ray: wallclock 0:00:07.03 total
mental ray: CPU user 0:00:05.78 total
mental ray: allocated 1 MB, max resident 2 MB, RSS 0 MB
Dave:~ blunt$

As an extra note I've just been tipped off that the smooth proxy feature in Maya 8 is a big buggy, that can result in the smooth version of a subdiv proxy pair failing to render.

[joojaa]

Yes the mr export might crap up especialy if you use mr to tesselate it. You can probably get by this problem by adding a triangulate in the end of history que.

I think the reason thsi happens might be more along the line of trying to be too clever from aliases part and userds believing what they see and not what happens.

Its actualy a fixable thing.