Questions about kick render

[teddude75]

I want to batch render with kick with Maya's render settings. Stuff like cameras, render layers, and all the render settings in Maya.Does Arnold kick use Maya render setting? I now that I have to do a for loop to render a sequence but the render cams are not rendering in the renders. Also I'm using a plug-in for hair called Ornatrix, do I have to source that plug-in in the command line. Does Arnold kick use plug-ins? It also uses pre render mel and post render mel.

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

An ASS file is file system version of all the information that MtoA gets from Maya. It's the same as if you rendered a Maya scene file, except that when your render a scene file, the info is stored in memory instead of saved to disk.

An ASS file is one render layer. You'll get one ASS file per render layer.

The Maya render settings are translated to an Arnold options node.

The options node will specify what camera to use by default.

There can be many camera nodes in the ass file. Use kick -c to set the active camera.

A plugin like Ornatrix provides an Arnold procedural. The ASS file includes that procedural node, and you have to tell Arnold where to find the implementation (where is OrnatrixProcedural.dll?). You can do that with the kick -l flag, or with the ARNOLD_PLUGIN_PATH env var.

kick doesn't use or know about pre-render or post-render MEL. That MEL, if it runs on export, would run before and after the ass file is exported.

[teddude75]

Ok How do I make a "for loop" for the cameras? Also it's sourcing the maya file? It's just writing out all the options of the Maya file? I can't have just the ass file?I need both the .ma and ass?

[Stephen.Blair]

If you are kicking ass, you don't need the Maya scene.

MtoA translates the Maya scene to an Arnold scene.

The ass file has nothing to do with the original scene file from whatever application you use. It's completely independent.

If all the cameras are exported to ASS (usually they are), you would need to know the names of the cameras to do something like this:

for each camera in cameras:
   kick -c camera -i example.ass

In the ass file, you'll see something like this:

options
{
 camera "cameraShape1"
}
persp_camera
{
 name cameraShape1
}
persp_camera
{
 name cameraShape2
}