Command line rendering

Your scene file determines whether you render a single frame or an animation. You can render from a shell or a command line. Before rendering, you may want to close all applications, including Maya, to maximize the amount of memory available for rendering.

When you render from a command line, you can set flags that override some of the Render Settings, saving time during test renders.

For more information, see Render from the command line in the Rendering Utilities guide.

To get quick renderer-specific information

Type:
Render -r rendername -help

where rendername is the name of the renderer.

Use the following options:
- mr = mental ray
- sw = software renderer
- hw = hardware renderer
- vr = vector renderer
- hw2 = hardware 2.0 renderer
- file = the file within which the renderer is specified
  Note
  If you get help on a file (-r file -help), only the flags common to all renderers, not a specific renderer, are shown. If you want renderer-specific information, you must specify the renderer.

All flags have a short description. Each flag corresponds to the appropriate section of the Render Settings window. See the Render Settings documentation for more detailed information on each option.

To obtain a complete list of command line Render options, from a shell or command line

Type:
Render -help

To render a scene with a specific renderer from a shell or command line

Type:
Render -r <renderername> <options> scene

TipYou may need to provide the -proj flag when issuing the render command to specify where the scene file is located, or to set a project. For example, type:
Render <options> -proj <proj path> scene

An example is as follows:

/Applications/Autodesk/maya2010/Maya.app/Contents/bin/Render -r mr -v 5 -proj /Users/username/Documents/maya/projects/default /Users/username/Documents/maya/projects/default/myScene.ma

In this example, Maya renders into the images directory specified after the -proj flag.

To render a scene with the renderer specified in the file from a shell or command line

Whichever renderer is specified in the file is used to render the scene.
Type:

Render -r file

To batch render using user-defined region rendering

Use the -reg flag. For example:
render -r mr -reg 0 100 0 100 scene.ma

where -reg 0 100 0 100 indicates the region to be rendered in pixels (left, right, bottom, top).

The above command renders the lower left 100 x100 pixel region of the scene.