Render High Res Images in maya?

[Lipeazevedo]

Hi!
First of all sorry for posting this Maya related question here, but as Im using MR I thought It would be a nice place to ask.
Im used to do High Res Images in Max, using MR and its Easy. I wonder if there is a easy way to do it with Maya. In Max, Im used to Split scan lines during the render, and give one line per computer over the network or even render it on the "render view". But Maya doesnt have this option, and at the same time I have 2 problems.

1. If I try to render on the render view, sometimes it crashes (probably some memory issue - but I have 24GB)
2. If I try batch render.. it simply doesnt work.. I keep waiting and no message appears ( I tryied from one day to another, but nothing changed and no image was created on disk.. only the folder was created)

I would love to be able to use the power of the computer on my network to render my final image (I know that I could use sattelite - read about it some time ago) But to use it I would have to do it on Render view or Batch render.. and assuming that both of them are not working for me.. I dont know what to do.

And, with Max I could watch the progress on the Backburner, what is nice!

So, is there a way to split my render and distribute it over my network? I saw some tutorial on the internet to Render one image dividing it with command line, but is there a easier way?? some script or some plugin, because with that, I would have to do all of my renderlayers doing this.. and each time I have to change model, or light or texture.. I would have to do it again, instead of pressing just one button..

Tnks in advance, and Im sorry if im doing wrong posting here.. If so, please just say me and Ill ask it again on cgtalk.

[Puppet]

First of all for rendering High Res images you should disable "Export Post Effects" in Render Settings.

[haggi]

Did you start with a lower res image and it worked? And did you have a look at memory usage to check if it can be a memory problem?

[Lipeazevedo]

Tnks for ur answers..
Didnt tried to disable "export post effects" yet. And didnt have time to try rendering high res again.
Yes, I tryied it with low and it was ok.. but for the final render, I needed it huge.. but when I hit render or snapshot, it freezes, and sometimes crashes maya. And I saw that when I do this my memory goes high..
I only wanted to find a way to render higher res images, without dividing the image by four with script lines (as I saw on the internet).. or at least find something like this that works over my network with other machines helping as I used to do with max.
but anyway.. tnks for the answers!

[bart]

Please let us know how it goes after disabling "Export Post Effects". I also assume you're not using any passes, ie user framebuffers?

What kind of OS are you using, and what kind might you have access to if you would try out Satellite?

Is this Maya 2012 (mr 3.9)? If so, it has an interesting utility for putting together pre-rendered tiles named imf_comp . Use 'imf_comp -h' to see usage. Assume the rendered outputs are all the same size as the final image, but has a rendered rectangle with an alpha of 1 to piece together easily a manually tiled up render. Also, there should be more info on in in the Appendix of the mental ray manual documentation.

[willanie]

I have done extensive testing with very high resolution renders. EXR seems to be the only format that is almost problem free with resolutions much higher than 13k, particularly if you will be using the renders in photoshop. (Be aware that photoshop will not load render passes which have non default exr layer names. This can be fixed with imf_copy.) EXR has the advantage of float color precision which is especially handy for long renders that need color correction.

The last time I tried mentalray network rendering(maya2011) where many network computers are used interactively, it took longer to render than just using one computer. I don't know if this has been addressed in maya2012 mentarlay3.9.

Have you considered batch rendering in subwindows. I have a simple little dos batch script that batch submits renders as sub window panels.
When rendering images in tiles on independent computers you should precompute the finalgathermap otherwise there will be visible differences between the sections.
The reason why Puppet suggests disabling "export post effects" is that we have all noticed that the option can increased the time to save the image dramatically.

[Puppet]

The reason why Puppet suggests disabling "export post effects" is that we have all noticed that the option can increased the time to save the image dramatically.

Common reason is that MayaGlow output shader will always crash with high res image.
In my class I always recommend to disable it in any scenes

[steve]

Hi Puppet,

what you say is interesting. I would think that the shader can not crash (it is rather straight-forward diffusion operation), but the allocation of the required extra "glow" framebuffer may not succeed, and that may cause a crash.

Do you have any hints about your system (RAM, 64bit) and software (Maya version), as well as resolution and image file type you are using ?

Best, Steve.

[Puppet]

Hmm... I did some test and I could not reproduce crash in Maya2012sp2 with simple scene.
Possible Maya2012 works better than previous versions or I should test more complex scene.

[Remydrh]

I can confirm I've had this happen as well for large images on machines with limited RAM. (4GB, etc) So it's less frequent now with 64-bit migration.

However, the mayaglow buffer is indeed very slow with large images and gives you the impression that Maya has frozen. A post output shader like the glare shader would be preferable to this (althought I understand the reasoning behind the mayaglow process, it's usually more of a pain recently as usage and methods have changed.)