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Maya CLI Render

Job summary

This job bundle renders a Maya software renderer scene with the Maya CLI Render command.

To run it, you will need a Maya installation available in the PATH in one of the following ways:

  • As a conda package when your queue has a conda queue environment set up to provide virtual environments for jobs. For more information see the developer guide section Provide applications for yor jobs.
  • Installed on the worker hosts that run the job. You can customize your Deadline Cloud queues, fleets, and this job to fit your own production pipeline.

The core of this job is an embedded template file called render.sh that invokes the Maya CLI Render command. The command is a template that substitutes job parameters and the frame task parameter.

The Render command is part of an Open Job Description step. It expands to a task per frame by defining a parameter space using the Frames job parameter. It limits the fleets it will run on by including host requirements for Linux.

The rest of the job template consists of the parameter definitions. This metadata specifies the names, types, and descriptions of each parameter, along with information on what user interface controls a GUI should use. The Deadline Cloud CLI command deadline bundle gui-submit uses this metadata to generate its UI.

The falling gears sample scene

We created this sample Maya scene with a goal for a small scene file that has a touch of interesting dynamics. The process used Maya with a bit of scripting. You can use the scene we created for testing, or produce similar scenes with the following steps.

  1. We're going to use the Bullet physics plugin, so in Windows -> Settings/Preferences -> Plugin Manager, make sure that bullet.mll is loaded.
  2. Create a ground plane (Create -> Polygon Primitives -> Plane) and then edit the objects Scale X, Y, Z to all be 20.
  3. Create four gears (Create -> Polygon Primitives -> Gear). Use the Move and Rotate tools to suspend them in the air in a way they will fall and collide in an interesting way. NOTE: Don't use the "duplicate" feature of Maya, that will turn the Gear primitive into a polygon mesh and make the Maya scene file large.
  4. Make a duplicate of each Gear primitive to use for the physics. The duplicates will be pGear5 through pGear8.
  5. Select pGear5 through pGear8, and with the FX menu set active, choose Bullet -> Active Rigid Body.
  6. Open the Attribute Editor, and for each of the active rigid bodies you created, and modify the Collider Shape Type from box to hull.
  7. Select pPlane1, and choose Bullet -> Passive Rigid Body.
  8. Select the bulletSolver1 object, and set Start Time to 0.
  9. Now if you play the timeline, you should see the gears fall and collide with the floor and each other. Run the following Python code in the Script Editor to bake this animation onto the original Gears. 
    for t in range(60):
    cmds.currentTime(t)
    cmds.refresh()
    for j in range(1, 5):
        src, dst = f"pGear{j + 4}", f"pGear{j}"
        for attr_name in ["translate", "rotate"]:
            at_value = cmds.getAttr(f"{src}.{attr_name}")[0]
            cmds.setKeyframe(dst, at=f"{attr_name}X", v=at_value[0])
            cmds.setKeyframe(dst, at=f"{attr_name}Y", v=at_value[1])
            cmds.setKeyframe(dst, at=f"{attr_name}Z", v=at_value[2])
  10. Delete the duplicates you made for the rigid body simulation, pGear5 through pGear8, along with bulletSolver1. You can also delete physics attributes from objects with Python commands like cmds.delete("|pPlane1|bulletRigidBodyShape5")
  11. Choose Windows -> Animation Editors -> Graph Editor. Select the objects pGear1 through pGear4. You should see all the physics animation curves. In the Graph Editor, choose Curves -> Key Reducer Filter. This will reduce the number of keys, and so the file size.