i had to collect the renderman attributes i can access through the maya command line renderer in order to automate my rendering process using a batch file; it was like putting the pieces of a puzzle together, since the documentation doesn’t cover this topic in much detail. it was a little bit frustrating that some global attributes are access in a standard way and some not: a good example is the width and height of the output file. well, here is what i put together:
- usually you set -x [width in pixels] and -y [height in pixels], but if you use renderman (-r rman) you have to set the output dimensions with -setAttribute Format:resolution “[width] [height]“.
- motion blur can be turned on/ off with -setAttr motionBlur 1.
- set the pixels samples with -setAttr PixelSamples “[value 1] [value 2]“.
- the shading rate is set by using -setAttr ShadingRate [value].
- the possible output formats (-of) are: Alias, Cineon, It, MayaIFF, OpenEXR, SGI8, SGI16, SoftImage, Targa, Tiff8, Tiff16, Tiff32.
these are the most important ones, i’ll edit this article as soon as i discover more interesting attributes that can be set through the command line (which are not already covered by the standard parameters). i dream of having all renderman attributes covered one day.