Rendering with Maya Terminal command line

So, want to start a render farm, which essentially sends command line commands to computers. You can do this yourself really.

I thought I'd document the command line stuff so that I can come back to it some other time.

So, to open the Maya Terminal, you can open up Terminal and type:
. /Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app/Contents/bin/MayaENV.sh

Now you'll have access to Maya terminal commands.

Here's a simple line to render a file:
render /Users/me/test.mb

Simply renders the file with the settings that are set inside that file (in the render settings).

You can use flags with this command to set all kinds of things. Found a good help page here. The ones I'm interested in are:

• -r mr
• uses mental ray for renderer
• -rd /Users/Shared
• uses the specified directory for rendering to
• -s 1
• sets the start frame of sequence to render
• -e 100
• sets the end frame of sequence to render
• -reg 0 250 0 250

• sets the render region to render 
• (left right bottom top)
• it's key to note that co-ordinates 0, 0 are at the bottom left of the image, so 0 250 0 250 renders a 250px square at the bottom left as pictured
• it creates a file of the proper resolution, and fills in the part which was rendered
• to combine, make sure each render 'region' has a different file name, peice it back together in photoshop
• -im mylovelyfile
• saves the render with this name
• -x 250
• renders this amount of pixels width-ways
• -y 250
• renders this amount of pixels height-ways
• -cam persp1
• the name of the camera you want to render from
• -proj /Users/Shared/
• uses this folder to load file
• -n 0
• use all available processors

If you're using mentalray, you can also use:

• -art
• mentalray measures how many cores you have and adjusts to maximise performance
• -v 5
• for render percentage

For a render farm, each node will need access to the .mb file and all the textures. It's also good to have them render to the same folder so you don't have to collect it all. I'd have the files on the server and run this command:

(first make a directory to mount the shared folder onto)

mkdir /Volumes/renderfarm

(then mount it)

mount -t afp afp://admin:password@my.server.dns.name/MySharedFolder /Volumes/renderfarm

I'd also be tempted to load the file up from this mounted directory and make sure the project path corresponds to this, so it can find all the sub-directories for textures and such.

On each computer you simply type the range of files to be rendered, so:

render -r mr -s 1 -e 10 -rd /Volumes/renderfarm/rendered/ -v 5 -art /Volumes/renderfarm/file1.mb

render -r mr -s 11 -e 20 -rd /Volumes/renderfarm/rendered/ -v 5 -art /Volumes/renderfarm/file1.mb
render -r mr -s 21 -e 30 -rd /Volumes/renderfarm/rendered/ -v 5 -art /Volumes/renderfarm/file1.mb

render -r mr -s 31 -e 40 -rd /Volumes/renderfarm/rendered/ -v 5 -art /Volumes/renderfarm/file1.mb

render -r mr -s 41 -e 50 -rd /Volumes/renderfarm/rendered/ -v 5 -art /Volumes/renderfarm/file1.mb