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Modifying renders in Maya's Render commandline and HW2.0

count.temp20
Contributor

Modifying renders in Maya's Render commandline and HW2.0

count.temp20
Contributor
Contributor

Hey everyone,
as you know, creating playblast in a with no active GUI in Maya is, well, technically irrelevant since in playblast you're actually creating snapshots of the viewport. However, I was told that I could achieve similar results using Hardware Renderer 2.0. So I have been rendering with the Render.exe using hw2, though results have not been remotely close to what I was hoping for. For starters, they images are mostly dark, they have no background and normals have not been reversed so some parts of objects are pitch black. I tried to tweak some default attributes or change the colorspace, I even tried to use re/post render scripts, but none of them seem to be working. OR, the way I'm using these commands and flags are wrong (which is what I'm suspecting atm). Here is an example:

Render -r hw2 -pad 1 -tc on -ehl off -ams off -keepMel -verb -s 1 -e 10 -cam p0010 -rd "Y:/" "Z:/path/to/file.mb"

So I guess my question is, is it entirely possible to use Render.exe to create a playblast-like outputs (which would help a lot in streamlining the pipeline)? if so, is it possible to modify the looks of the result like making it brighter or adding some background or modifying normals and what not? 
Also, if the answer to the first question was a yes, how can the process be made efficient enough so renders are finished in a reasonable time?
I'm aware this thread is a bit long, but I anyone could help me out with any of the issues I pointed out, I'd very much appreciate it!

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count.temp20
Contributor
Contributor

So I managed to fix the render problem and the colors. But, me being a perfectionist, can't really wrap my head around the amount of time it takes to finish this job. So I went back to trying playblast in a headless maya. Clearly there is a problem with loading textures and everything else seems to be working fine. It's just that I don't know what the problem is in the first place before attempting to fix it. The images below show the difference between a blast in a headless Maya and a blast in a normal Maya UI. As you can see, the textures are poorly loaded and there are some hints of aa texture on the surfaces. I tried messing with clamping settings but didn't find any luck. I'm going nuts on this if anyone has any idea, I'd be grateful!

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