Hi,
Every time I try to Batch render my sequence out the batch render monitor either stops working or crashes about every 10 frames and I have to begin the batch render again from the frame it stopped on.
I'm not sure why this is doing this, I have tried to research it but I haven't had any luck so far.
I hope you can help!
If you need any more info like screenshots etc...just let me know and I can send some over if it helps.
Katie
Are you rendering with Mentalray? If so, do you have Maya/Mentalray loaded on more than one machine?
Have you set your project properly by creating a separate folder and setting the project into the folder and creating a default workspace?
Have you tested creating a new project with a simple shape and simple animation and tested to see if your program still crashes?
Also, try changing to different renderers and see if it still crashes. How complicated is your scene and what operating system and computer type are you using. How much RAM do you have?
Mentalray needs to connect to the internet to render on the educaton version, I think. So, do you have a wifi or hardwired interenet connection?
This is a problem we run into quite often unfortunately... especially if you have hair or fluids in a scene or it's just a big scene. Our way around it had been to render from the command line and create a script that basically restarts the render every frame... so if one frame crashes, it just moves on to the next and rendering continues... then you just render the missing frames later.. not as fast a render since the process is restarting each frame. BUT this way you don't come in the next morning and find your render isn't complete.
What OS are you on?
I've been using Maya 2013 and 2014 on OS 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9 over the past year and I constantly run into this issue with mental ray. I have an ongoing case with Autodesk Support, but they basically say they can't reproduce it so oh well. It's gotten to the point where I'm just going to switch to V-Ray.
It is also possible to write an applescript, or shell script that monitors the render folder, checks every few minutes, and then opens terminal and starts the render again if a new frame hasn't appeared in a certain amount of time.
Well, I've found a suprisingly simple workaround for this. If you render with a shell script (mac) or batch file (windows), you can use a simple for loop, and basically tell it to render one frame at a time.
so instead of entering something like
Render -Proj ~/MyProject -r mr -s 001 -e 900 MyScene.ma
you would make a script with this
for ((i=1; i<=900; i++ )) do Render -Proj ~/MyProject -r mr -s $i -e $i MyScene.ma done
this syntax is for a bash shell script, I'm not sure what it would be on Windows, but something similar.