Maxwell - Maya batch render issue

[mitchrichie]

I'm using the Maxwell plug in for maya 8.5 on a intel mac pro.

 

When I render a single frame it works fine, but when I try to render out an animation, via image sequence, I get something really strange on every image in the sequence.

 

See links below:

 

Messed up image in batch render sequence:

http://www.ragusmedia.com/test1.jpg

 

Normal single render:

http://www.ragusmedia.com/test2.jpg

 

 

Any ideas why?

[Devin Johnston]

You should post this on the Maxwell forum, I don't use Maya but batch rendering may not work with that plugin. I've never seen anything like what you’re showing.

[mitchrichie]

I did post on the maxwell forum... The problem seems to stem from maxwell losing texture maps... Where is the appropriate place to put textures so maxwell can find them? You can set the location for it to look for them when you render an animation, but it doesn't seem to help.

[Devin Johnston]

Any time you’re rendering with more than one computer you need to have all your maps accessible to every machine by putting them in a folder every machine has full access to. You also need to make sure that the material paths are pointing to this folder and not some local drive.

[mitchrichie]

I'm only using one computer - just rendering an animation - or sequence of frames.

[Devin Johnston]

If you only using one computer then there is something else wrong, typically you see Maxwell loose files over a network when it doesn’t have access to where that file is stored. There should be no reason for it to loose textures if everything was created and resides on a single hard drive. You should try posting this in the Maya section of the Maxwell site; there might be someone who has seen this before. If that doesn’t work try contacting tech support or send a PM to Mihai or Tom.

[mitchrichie]

Thanks, I'll give that a shot.

[mitchrichie]

Still can't get the Batch render to work. But I did discover some things and was able to render an animation by exporting each frame as .mxs and rendering the sequence outside of maya.

 

Turns out the shaders that I had downloaded from the Maxwell site were causing the problem... I built my own shaders from inside maya, and that did the trick.

 

I will do more testing with batch render in the coming days.