IK Render View Renderer

I’m using Maya 2012 64-bit on Mac OS X, and there are often times when I can not figure out why the batch renderer is taking so damn long to render my frames. One project for example was taking on average 1.5 minutes per frame in Maya’s native Render View, yet that same frame took almost 11 minutes PER FRAME when I rendered via the Batch Renderer. What’s up with that Autodesk?!

After many hours of trying to troubleshoot it I gave in and found Mr. Irakli Kublashvili’s IK Render View Batch Renderer. It is a simple MEL file that you copy to your scripts folder, then in Maya you type “IK_renderViewBr;” to launch a nice dialog box that allows you to pick the folder, start and end frames, frame size and other relevant options for your IK Render View Batch Render. Once you click on the Render button it renders each frame in Maya’s Render View window, when the frame is complete it saves it to the folder you specify, and automatically starts the next frame continuing until it reaches the end frame.

Major props to Irakli for creating this. A project that would have taken roughly 36 hours to render with Maya’s Batch Renderer finished in the more appropriate 5-6 hours I originally had expected. I hope this helps some of you!

Visit Irakli’s site here

Download the plugin from Creative Crash here

I suspect that after the Snow Leopard Font Update, it somehow deactivated Verdana. I wish After Effects CS5 would pop up a more descriptive window stating something like, “After Effects Warning: Verdana font not installed. Please re-install.”, but at this point I’m just happy to have it working again.

I hope this helps someone out there.

10.0.2 supposedly fixes this annoying little glitch. Here are a few other fixes taken from Adobe’s readme.

Notable Fixes

• Issue where users may encounter a persistent “unexpected data type” error message when opening projects containing missing effects with layer parameters at non-default values. (54666)
• Crashing condition when importing compositions created with Automatic Duck’s Pro Import AE plug-in. (W2796549)
• Crashing condition when using the Directional Blur effect with Mthread.plugin enabled. (55603)

Known Issues

• Possible hang on startup if firewall software (such as ZoneAlarm) previously blocked the After Effects application (AfterFX.exe), Adobe QT32 Server.exe, or dynamiclinkmanager.exe. For more information, see http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/857/cpsid_85711.html. (2644373)
• Blocky artifacts in RGB color channels using Canon 5D MKII footage. (2618756)
• BMP footage in a CS4 project opens as missing footage. Workaround: Relink footage
  after opening. (2620346)
• RED: CS4 and CS5 (version 10.0) projects that use the existing color science will use the
  new color science (version 2) when opened in 10.0.2. Also, RED settings are not retained if a 10.0.2-saved project is opened in 10.0 (which has the older color science). If you are using R3D footage in a multiple-machine environment, make sure all machines are using the same version of After Effects. (2645416)
• RED: If another application acquires the ROCKET card before After Effects does, After Effects does not display a message at launch that it will fall back to software (non- ROCKET) rendering. (2673949)

After Effects error: making file specification – no such volume (-35)

Yeah, it sucks.  Well, today was my first time experiencing this error.  I was opening an archived After Effects project, and as soon as it started to open I saw the error message.  I racked my brain trying to figure out why it was missing media because I was opening the project from a collected files folder.  I kept saying to myself,”This is what collected files is for…I shouldn’t be missing ANYTHING!”.  To top it all off, I had to continuously click the button as it tried to open the project because it was missing every single asset.  Finally it opened in After Effects and all assets were missing so I relinked everything and saved the project.  Fast forward 10 minutes later, AE crashed on me and I had to restart the program only to be welcomed by that annoying error message AGAIN!  So I got smart and googled the error message.

Well it turns out that the HFS file system on Mac has a 32 character limit on any Volume Name.  My external drive was exactly 32 characters.  I simply closed After Effects, renamed the external drive by shaving off a few characters of the Volume Name and TADA…Everything was fine!

So lesson of the day: Don’t make your Volume Names longer than 32 characters!

For example:  I have a Maya 2009 project that needs to work in Maya 2008.  It uses nCloth which was available in 2008 so we are golden there.

• Save the Maya 2009 scene file as a .MA (Maya Ascii file format)
• Open it in any text editor and make sure it’s in plain text format.
• Find the lines of code that reference the Maya version number like this:

//Maya ASCII 2009 scene
//Name: name of maya scene.ma
//Last modified: Sat, Jan 16, 2010 1:12:40 PM
//Codeset: UTF-8
requires maya "2009";

• And simply comment out the lines at the beginning of the file by adding two slashes “//”:

//Maya ASCII 2009 scene
//Name: name of maya scene.ma
//Last modified: Sat, Jan 16, 2010 1:12:40 PM
//Codeset: UTF-8
//requires maya "2009";

There is a new method since the Maya 2008 release (I think that’s when they started this). If you click on File > Open Scene > Option Box, you’ll see a little checkbox to “ignore version“. Much easier this way.

NOTE: If you are using nodes that are exclusive to a new release, this will not work or at least the exclusive nodes will not import.  That will require a little trial and error.

Well I found a page with a tip from Johnnygozy:

I think I’ve figured out a solution for this problem. If you click on the mail icon, then hold down command and option keys while clicking on preferences in the drop down box, you will be prompted with a box that has a key and value prompt. Type “AutocheckInterval” under key (this seems to be case-sensitive) and then under value type in the number in minutes of how often you want it checked. You will need to quit out of the notifier (again found in the drop down box under the mail icon) and then run the app again for your change to take effect.  I typed in 1 and it is checking every minute or so now for me. I hope this works for everyone else too.

This worked perfectly for me, but some users are experiencing trouble.  Give it a try.

If you are trying to bring locators from Maya into After Effects, or camera data this is a very important tool to have. I especially enjoy the fact that you can simply select any object in Maya, type “pass2obm” and save it to a file.  Once in After Effects you can simply import the OBM file and it populates layers with white locators for each object.  After Effects has the ability to bring in .ma files from Maya, but the nulls have to be named null, and they are imported in as a hidden null object.  The MoCon script works with any naming convention, and creates small solid layers for easy visualization.

Check out 3Dmation here.

Error: File contains unknown nodes or data.  To preserve this information, the current file type cannot be changed.

ls -type unknown;

delete XXXXXX

If someone knows of a simpler method to remove all unknown nodes let me know.