Maxwell Render

We're continuously experiencing a frustrating issue using Maxwell for Maya upon re-opening scenes.

We'll have our render output size set to HD 1080, render out a still locally and it looks fine.

Once we close and reopen the scene, the image suddenly renders at half the resolution setup in render globals. Absolutely nothing was changed on the scene and we're opening it on the same workstation.

When we put that same scene on our render farm, it renders one scanline shy of what's set in render globals... i.e. - 1080x1919 instead of 1080x1920.

As you can imagine, it places us in the predicament of never being able to render the right image size and getting into situations where the mattes don't fit the beauty passes.

We've seen the issue in both Maya 2008 & 2009, with each respective version of the plugin. It happens to roughly a third of the scenes we render in Maxwell.

On another topic... why do alpha channels take so long to render??? If it takes seconds to render material and mesh ID mattes... why does it take, say - about 10 minutes per frame to render a clean HD 1080 matte on a scene with about 350,000 polys on a dual quad Xeon 3GHz blade???

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Ryan Thompson
ryan@giantsteps.us
www.giantsteps.us

This is weird, since the resolution setting is a Maya built-in, not something managed by the plug-in. Can you check the "Test Resolution" submenu in the Render menu when it renders at half resolution? Is "Render Settings" still checked, or has it switched to another mode?

Once this behaviour shows up in a scene, can you reproduce it reliably? In that case, could you send me a scene file so I can investigate? Does it happen on several workstations?

Do all your images shrink by one line on the farm, or only those scenes affected by the half resolution problem?

Thanks for your reply. Oddly enough, the test resolution was set to 50%. Weird thing is... it was happening on multiple machines. Farm renders render at either full size or one scan line less though.

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Ryan Thompson
ryan@giantsteps.us
www.giantsteps.us

Do you use Maxwell's network rendering system for the farm, or another system built on top of Maya? If it's the latter, does the farm software force the resolution with a command line switch, or does it use what's stored in the scene file? Do you have any pre-render scripts which run on the farm and could interact with the resolution setting?

maybe try to check the pixel ratio in the render globals (if it's 1:1) , sometimes I may be like 1.0001 so that's the line. or in the camera attributes - maybe theres the problem not having the same ratio as your resolution (like 1.5 to 1.51 so the render is "confused")

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ahh....ahhh....ahhh......no !!