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Maya FAQ

1 Maya FAQ

Which versions of Maya are supported?

Maya versions 7.x, 8.x, and 2008 are all supported by Deadline.

Which Maya renderers are supported?

MayaSoftware, MayaHardware, MayaVector, MentalRay, Mental Ray Exporter, Renderman, Gelato, 3Delight, VRay, Final Render and Turtle are all supported.

Does the Maya plugin support Tile Rendering?

Yes. See the Submission Dialog documentation for more details.

Which Maya application should I select as the render executable in the plugin configuration?

Select the Render.exe application. This is Maya's command line renderer.

What is the MayaBatch plugin, and how is it different than the original Maya plugin?

This is a new experimental plugin that keeps the Maya scene loaded in memory between frames, thus reducing the overhead of rendering the job. If this overhead is detrimental to your render times, we suggest giving this plugin a try. If you run into any problems though, you can always revert back to using the normal Maya plugin.

When I render with Maya on a machine with multiple processors, Maya isn't rendering at 100% CPU usage. What can I do?

Try launching Maya on the machines that the problem is occurring on, and set the number of threads under the batch render options. This has been known to fix the issue.

Does Deadline support Maya render layers feature that was introduced in Maya 7?

Yes. You can either submit one job that renders all the layers, or you can submit a single job per layer.

Can I render scenes that use Maya Fur?

A recommended setup for Maya is to have your project folder on a shared location that all of your machines can see (whether it be a Windows folder share or a mapped path), then create your Maya scene in this project folder. This way, when you submit the job to Deadline, you can specify the shared project path in the submission dialog, and all of your slave machines will be able to see it (and therefore see the Maya Fur folders within the project folder).

Can I make use of the particle cache during network renders?

Yes you can. All that is necessary to do this is to make your scene's project directory network-accessible by your slaves. For a guide to setting up particle caches, check out this guide on the ResPower site that describes the proper set-up procedure for the Maya particle cache.

When rendering with Mental Ray in Maya 7.0, the rendered images are sent to the Project path instead of the Image Output Path.

There is a bug in Maya 7.0 that causes the command line option which specifies the output path in Mental Ray to be ignored. This has been addressed in Maya 7.0.1.

Currently, the best solution is to ensure the project path you specify is network accessible, and that the Maya Plugin option "RenderToNetworkDrive" is set to true. Doing this disables the local rendering feature, and ensures that your rendered images are saved on the network.

When clicking on one of the folder browser buttons in the Maya submission dialog, I sometimes get an error.

There is an article on this problem. It's a .NET problem that seems to randomly occur when the user specifies a path of more than 130 characters, but it looks like Microsoft provides a hotfix for it.

When submitting the job from Maya, if I check the Submit Each Render Layer As A Separate Job box, no jobs are submitted to Deadline when you click submit.

The render layers you want to submit need to be set to renderable (the letter 'R' need to be there next to the render layer) for the submitter to submit the layer. Note that render layer should not be confused with display layer. Deadline only deals with render layers. It is not using the Maya option to render only the content of a specific display layer.

I'm trying to render certain frame range from maya, but Deadline is rendering the entire frame range set in the Maya render globals.

If you have the Submit Each Render Layer As A Separate Job box checked, Deadline grabs the frame information from each individual layer's render globals when submitting the job. If unchecked, Deadline will use the info from the Frame List in the submission dialog.

Rendering Maya scenes with Deadline is taking forever in comparison to a local render of the same file.

One thing you can try is ensuring that RenderToNetworkDrive in the Maya Plugin Settings is set to False. You can do this in the Monitor in Super User Mode by selecting Tools -> Configure Plugins, then select the Maya plugin from the list on the left. This forces Maya to render the frame locally, then copy it to the final destination after. This has been known to improve rendering speeds.

How do I configure Mental Ray Satellite to render Mental Ray for Maya jobs with Deadline?

Choose a satellite master machine, then modify the maya.rayhosts of the that machine so that it uses the slaves you want.
Only put the master machine in Deadline.
Submit a job to deadline, and make sure that the job will be picked-up by the master machine you have setup. Use pools to do so.
In the job property page of the Maya job, in the Maya tab, you could add the following line in the additional arguments field: -rnm 1

This -rnm 1 means "render no master true", whicht will force the master not to participate in the rendering but only submit and receive the render tasks. You will get better results this way.

You could also use -rnm 0 which means "render no master false" and force 1 cpu on the master (if your master is a dual cpu) so you have 1 cpu free on the master to dispatch the task. In short you should always have 1 cpu free on the master machine for dispatching or else your render time will suffer.

I have a multi-core machine, but when rendering the machine isn't using 100% of the cpu. What can I do?

Try launching Maya on the machines that the problem is occurring on, and set the number of threads under the batch render options. This has been known to fix the issue.