Rendering an image sequence - Maya Tutorial

- [Instructor] Rendering an animation image sequence is a little bit different in Arnold than it is in other renderers, due to the Arnold licensing scheme. The version of Arnold included with Maya has some limitations. If you do have a standalone Arnold license, you can render in the background in the usual way. And that would be from the Rendering menu set, Render, Batch Render. Likewise, if you have a standalone Arnold license, you can render from the Command line, or on a network render farm. However, if you don't have a separate license of Arnold installed, and you just have the Maya license, then Network, Command Line, and Batch Rendering, will result in a watermark on the image. To render without a watermark, use the render sequence command. The downside of this, is that while render sequence is running, you can't continue to work in Maya as you can with those other methods. Let's set up our basic parameters for the rendering. Open up the Render Settings window. In the Comment tab, I'll leave the file name prefix at the default. We'll just use the file scene name as our image name. I'll also leave the image format at the default of EXR, which is a floating point High Dynamic Range image format. To save a little bit of disk space, I am going to enable Half Precision. That's going to give us the same color gamage or exposure range with half the accuracy. Generally speaking, we won't be able to notice the difference. We're going to render an image sequence, so in the Metadata section under Frame Animation Extension, we want to choose an animation format. Let's choose name dot number dot extension. Once we've chosen an animation format, then our frame range becomes available. Set the start frame to Frame 1. The end frame to Frame 15 and press Enter. Scrolling down a little bit, under Renderable Cameras, the renderable camera is set to Camera DOF already. But this setting is only for the batch render command. It doesn't effect the render sequence window. We'll need to choose our camera in the render sequence window. And so this setting's actually not relevant. For the purposes of the demo, I'm using low resolution output of only 480 by 270. Let's check in on the Arnold render settings. In the Arnold Renderer tab, we previously set this up with adaptive sampling. To shorten our render times. We've got a minimum of two, and a maximum of six camera samples. Go into the System tab and in the Render Settings, we have the ability to determine how many threads or virtual cores Arnold will use during a production rendering. And by default, Autodetect Threads is enabled. And Arnold will use all available system processing power to render the frames. If you plan to use your computer for anything else, or if you're worried about your system overheating, I'd recommend you reduce the number of threads that Arnold devotes to rendering. We can disable Autodetect Threads And set the number of threads or virtual cores manually here. The way I like to use this is to set a negative value. And then Arnold will use the equivalent of all of the cores minus the value we set. If I set threads to negative one, then Arnold will leave one core equivalent available for other processes. And then I won't have any problems with performance if I'm trying to check my email or whatever. Okay, so we've set up our render settings, we can close that window. Now open the Render View from the Status line, click on the clapboard icon that has an eye on it to open the render view. We're not initiating a rendering, we're just opening the window. Go into the Render View menus to Render, Render Sequence, Options. And here we need to choose the current camera. Set that to camera DOF. And because we're rendering an image sequence, we want to output into its own folder and we can specify that folder here under Alternate Output File Location. Click to browse and we're taken to our current project's images. Let's create a sub folder in there. And we'll call it 0702sequence. Press Enter and then with that folder selected, click the Select button. And it's listed here. Now we're ready to execute this command. Be aware that you will not be able to interact with Maya while the rendering is running. Once you click Render Sequence, or Render Sequence and Close this instance of Maya is going to be locked up for however long the render sequence takes or until you cancel it with the escape key on the keyboard. You might want to size and position the windows so that you can see the rendering as it progresses, because once you start rendering, you won't be able to move anything. When you're ready you can execute the render sequence command. Render Sequence and Close will close this options box when the rendering completes. Click on that to start the rendering. Now while this is running, even if we launched another instance of Maya, there might be limitations in the hypershade or in the Arnold Render View. The render sequence command does get the job done and it's okay for students or no budget productions, but if you need to do any serious Arnold rendering, you probably want to look into getting an Arnold license from Autodesk. Another way to go would be to look into a cloud rendering service that has the appropriate Arnold licensing. And that may be cheaper than getting an Arnold license for your work station, depending upon how much you need to render. That's how to use the render sequence command to render an animation in Arnold.