Maxwell Render

Sorry, that's a bug. Please download this file and place it under (maya path)\bin\rendererDesc.

First of all, Maxwell can't render to SGI so the plug-in tries to force TGA output. You can only render TGA, JPG, PNG, BMP and TIFF images. This is a limitation in the render engine, so there's nothing you can do about it right now.

The error you're getting is because you're appending the frame number to the file name. Unfortunately, Maxwell figures out what image format to use by looking at the extension. In your case, it thinks you're asking for the "0001" image type and it aborts because it doesn't know what that is. Set your file naming scheme to "name.#.ext", "name_#.ext", "name#.ext" or anything else which keeps the extension at the end.

There's a separate switch for specifying the naming scheme: -fnc "mode", where mode is one of the options from the "Frame/Animation ext." field. For example, using

render -r maxwell -s 1 -e 2 -pad 4 -nt 0 -of tga -fnc "name_#.ext" -rd c:/temp/maxwell/Model_Boxes_CC -cam camMain -im Model_Boxes_CC_Maxwell c:/temp/maxwell/maxwellTest.ma

will produce Model_Boxes_CC_Maxwell_0001.tga, Model_Boxes_CC_Maxwell_0002.tga and so on.

The order in which you specify the parameters is not important, -pad 4 -im blahblah is the same as -im blahblah -pad 4.

The output is buffered in some funny way when rendering from the command line, there's a delay between when the renderer says something and when it's actually displayed in the console. This delay isn't there when simply using mxcl.exe to render, so it's something that Maya's batch render utility sets up for some reason that's not clear to me. Anyway, this doesn't influence your render times, the application quits the moment when it's finished rendering the last frame.