Command line rendering with -preRender

[popngen]

Hi everyone,

Has anyone been able to get the command-line -preRender flag working?

something like:

Render -preRender /shared/test.mel mayaScene.mb
or
Render -preREnder "/shared/test.mel" mayaScene.mb

... doesn't seem to like it and spits back:
Error: /shared/test.mel; // -Flag -preRender
Error: Syntax error

Anyone get this to work before?

[joojaa]

the flag is called just -pre the section in the manuals that details what flags the render uutility has been derived from old versions of maya by accident and is largely obsolete, use render -? for the flags instead. So the manual actualy has a erreor at thispoint.

[popngen]

Thanks for the help.

Unfortunately, -pre doesn't work either. Same exact problem occurs.
I'll try to fiddle around with it more, but there isn't an intuitive way to look at this flag besides providing a path to a mel script.

[joojaa]

by having the mel in the lookup path for eithet the project, maya prefs or user prefs.

[failure]

You should specify a mel command as the flag value, not the path to mel file

[popngen]

i've given that a shot, but specifying a single command isn't sufficient for what i need to do (and even if the mel command is "source " doesn't work).

i'm getting around this problem by doing something like:

maya -prompt -script -render

it works (ie doesn't fail), but that's only a quarter of my battles in dealing with scenes that appear to have a renderable camera when you open the UI, but disappears when the mel script tries to find it (ie persp/perspShape1).

[joojaa]

Are you sure the problem isnt in your melscript itself? you can offcourse allways use the -cam switch to force a camera to render.

(also note thet rendering from ui switches wich cameras are on!)

[popngen]

good question. now that i've gone around the -preRender script, it is in fact probably an issue with my mel script. however, the mel script works fine on some scenes, and not on others.

i've been using -cam persp for all my renders, and a mel script to get all my objects into persp's view. i'm doing a ton of batch renders via python so rendering w/o the UI tends to void certain mel commands (ie working with the 'active view').

[joojaa]

well it is possible to termporarily launc a maya with ui and quit offcourse. But most of the commands you need dont acctualy need the panel name... Its jut that the ui fronts wich you get when echoing are using theese because they work ON panels.

Any possibility you canpost some of the prblematic code.

Note thet most commands work fine without panel intervention its just if you do scripting by pasting text form echo all you need to dig down to find the actual command used and not their mel, or runtime fronts.

For example without a panel, fitting the view would be

viewFit -all cameraShapeName

Wich would be the actual command that gest called with fitPanel wich is the mel proc thats attached to your a key (note you can find this out by asking either whatIs fitPanel, or whaIs FrameSelected and then asking runTimeCommand -q -c FrameSelected and then asking whatIs fitPanel if you like it the hard way around)

[popngen]

I did manage to get past the problematic code by experimenting with the correct viewFit, and digging down to the actual commands used as you noted; all commands I used were panel irrelevant.

It took me quite a while since some commands appear to have worked and others didn't on other scenes (all opened with python scripts)

I had to finally use in-house tools to create rib-edits that inserted the test mel scripts prior to piping them directly to renderman instead of using maya's in-house renderer--since maya didn't spit back any error except for "syntax error" which is completely NOT helpful.

As for the bug that I believe exists, Alias wavefront is kind enough to work with me on it. I'll post again if it turns out to be an actual bug.

go figure.