Rendering Problem

# 1 25-09-2006 , 05:57 AM

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I have a rendering problem, it wont render at all... I made a waving flag with wind and stuff, but when i try to render it wont work. I've tried .avi and .tga but it when i look at the file in windows explorer it always says 0kb, even after a few hours. I saw the rendering globals tutorial, but mine doesent show the percentage done like his. The only thing i got working was rendering with maya hardware, with .tga. it didnt show the percentage either but got to frame 200. i stopped it there because it was very diferent from the actual maya scene.

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# 2 25-09-2006 , 07:29 AM

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Are you rendering with Maya or Mental Ray? Maybe your globals are set too high. Try lowering your anti-aliasing or maybe your raytrace settings.

You didn't give much info to go off of. Give us more info and maybe we can be more helpful. Good luck.

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# 3 25-09-2006 , 08:10 AM

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What else do you need infowise? and i tried rendering with maya and mentel ray nither worked.

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# 4 25-09-2006 , 08:54 AM

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What are your render global settings? What didn't work? What does it do? What messages are in the render logs? How many polys are in your scene?

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# 5 25-09-2006 , 09:25 AM

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under the common tab in render setting i have:
image format avi
start frame:1
end frame:500
camera: perspective

IMage Size
width :1024 x 768
resolution 72

under the maya software tab i just used intermediate quality but change the anti aliasing to medium.

all the log says is
Image name is now AmericanFlag
// Result: saving temporary file C:/Documents and Settings/David/My Documents/maya/projects/default/scenes/AmericanFlag__1472.mb //
// Result: Rendering with Maya Software... //

k...I kinda got the .avi working but really slowly. its bearly using my cpu at all... how can i speed it up?

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# 6 25-09-2006 , 09:41 AM

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For one, you may just have a slow computer. Maybe you're scene has too many shadow lights, are you using fog? Glow? Displacements? High polygon models? These are things that will slow down you renders.

As for the AVI, I never render to AVI so I'm not sure what to say. I always render frames (SGI, TIF, TGA, even JPG) and then compile a movie file later. That way I can see each frame as it renders. Often my renders can take 5-30 minutes a frame. 500 frames of that would take a long time. If your computer starts to choke after a while, you could end up screwed.

Also, I didn't know you were doing this in Maya. By rendering within Maya, a lot of your Ram is being used just to keep the application open. I recommend closing Maya when you're ready to render and render through the command line interface. I wrote a simple dos batch file once that I'll give you. It's really simple.

Edit my file in any text editor (notepad), and change the project field to where your project lives, the images field to where you want the renders to go, and the file field should point to your Maya file. Leave my render global overrides alone until you get more experienced. Save the file. Change the "txt" extention to "bat", and double click it.

I hope this helps.

Attached Files

render_file.txt (3.4 KB, 514 views)

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# 7 25-09-2006 , 10:36 AM

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I have an AMD 64bit 3200+ processor with a nvidia geforce 7900 graphics card and 2.5gigs of ram
im not using fog, glow, or displacements, and its just a flag and a pole so i dont think there highpolygon models.

Thanks for the file.

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# 8 25-09-2006 , 10:56 AM

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Just one thing -- while your computer rocks... the videocard means nothing in Maya Software/Mental Ray.

I'm actually wishing they used the GPU in MentalRay/Software optionally to make use of ShaderModel3; they could gain a near 10-fold increase in speed offloading certain processes. It won't give a 10-fold increase in speed, but even if one of every three processes can be done on the GPU -- that's ~3x speed.

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# 9 25-09-2006 , 12:30 PM

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While the GPU can render certain things things faster (it can't render some things at all), you must remember it does so with worse quality. GPUs are designed with speed rather quality in mind.

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# 10 25-09-2006 , 09:16 PM

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but why isint it useing my cpu at all? its been going for about 12 hrs streight and it still isint done...
Why is lighwave so much faster at rendering? is there a way i could port the animation to lightwave somehow? or is there a faster way to render stuff in maya?

EDIT: k i made a similar thing in lightwave... doesent look half as good...but it takes only about....10mins to render....because lightwave is using my cpu fully...why does lightwave do that and not maya?

Last edited by kerragan; 25-09-2006 at 09:42 PM.

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# 11 25-09-2006 , 11:59 PM

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Clearly there is something wrong with your configuration. I would try re-installing the software, because Maya should not do what yu're saying. Sorry.

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# 12 26-09-2006 , 12:03 AM

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yea...im going to try that...
Right now though i just gave up and im rendering each frame in .tga. Its going faster but its still not using any of my cpu. Ill try and upload the the thing when its done. Im useing maya hardware though. It didnt work with software.

EDIT: nvm, it dosent work with hardware, it renders, but not like it has it when i play it in maya. when i render it, it is nothing like what it looks in maya.

EDIT2: k...now im just using the .bat file that you gave me, and it seems to be working, hopefully it will work. it is using all of my cpu also...

Edit3: Yes! its working! the .bat is working perfectly, useing my cpu totaly, going fast and looking nice.
apparantly it wont work from just maya for some reason. well thank you guys so much for all the help, you have been really nice and helpful. thank you so much Dann for the .bat file

Last edited by kerragan; 26-09-2006 at 12:43 AM.

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