Tip of the Week: Command Line Mental Ray

Rendering outside of the Maya GUI (either by right clicking or using .bat files) provides all kinds benefits over normal batch rendering. (If you're unfamiliar with the process, you can read my tutorial on rendering with bat files). However, you can run into some obstacles when using Mental Ray.

Normally, if you right click on a Maya file and click render, the render will adhere to all of the render global settings in your file - start frame, end frame, image name, etc. However, one thing that it ignores is which renderer to use.

You can set your scene up and set all the mental ray settings, but when you try to render it outside the Maya GUI, it will always start rendering with the software renderer by default.

In order to make it render with Mental Ray, you have to specifically force it. Right clicking and clicking render won't work. You have to either open up the command line or create a .bat file.

For instance:

render myscene.mb

Will render in software by default, no matter what the settings in the file are. Instead, type:

render -r mr myscene.mb

For those of you who aren't familiar with this kind of rendering, I hope that you'll check out my tutorial or explore the Maya documentation, because it's a really useful production tool. If you're already familiar with using .bat files, and you've had trouble getting Mental Ray renders to work, I hope that this tip has been useful.