Arnold Kick camera issues (and best way to use)

[davidAZX57]

Hi

I use Arnold Kick using a bat file to render a sequence but I often have issues with the cameras. I found that it ignores scene camera so I specify the camera to use, but often this kicks up an error and seems hit and miss. I have a render going now where the camera seems to have rendered correctly, but using the maya flags it puts my "renderCam" camera into a folder called "persp", or "side".

Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way to render an ASS sequence that is more reliable and less prone to issues?

Any help much appreciated....

For reference, the script I use is this:

----------------------------------------------------------------

@echo off

REM # Set Frame Count

set count=70

setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion

REM # Set Scene ASS file name

set SCENE="D:\---------file path + file -------------"

REM # Set Arnold folder path

set MTOA_PATH="C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Arnold\maya2022"

REM # Set Shader Path

set SHADER_SEARCH_PATH=%MTOA_PATH%\shaders

REM # Set Bin Path for Kick command

set MTOA_BIN_PATH=%MTOA_PATH%\bin

REM # Kick Sequence with For Loop count

REM # Current setup below disables display window, display progressive, and has verbosity level 4

for /L %%i in (1, 1, %count%) do (

set "frame=000000%%i"

set frame=!frame:~-4!

%MTOA_BIN_PATH%\kick.exe -i %SCENE%.!frame!.ass -c "/renderCam_Grp/renderCam/renderCamShape" -l %SHADER_SEARCH_PATH% -dw -dp -v 4

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Stephen.Blair]

As ass file has a camera specified in the options node. That's the camera used by default.

If kick -c fails, then the wrong camera name is specified. It has to be the name that you see for the camera node in the ass file.

Setting the camera with kick -c won't change the output path. That is set by MtoA when the scene is exported, and is based on the Maya render settings.

[davidAZX57]

Ok thanks Stephen, good to know. I'll triple check all this on the next export, it seemed a bit fundamental to not be human error in this case.

[davidAZX57]

Ok, so I set the camera in the batch file, and set the camera in the maya settings to the correct camera, but it's still saving to a folder called "persp" when I add "<Camera>" in the filename in Maya. Where is this default "Persp" coming from? It seems to render the right camera in the file so that's good, but the output folder that it's creating still has the wrong name. Is this a bug? It's not exactly a showstopper but odd nevertheless.