An update to Backburner For Maya
I guess we all expected to get an update to this tool which is free and lately got pretty stable.
Whenever I was using Backburner for Maya I had to use a Custom Command even for some very simple options, so one day I said, Ok That’s Enough.
From that moment I started making some changes to the script and made more options available in the UI. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve started doing this in production environment so I’ve tested it a lot. A couple of weeks ago I thought maybe it’s a good idea to share it with you guys. Then I thought OK, let’s add the Find Missing Frames Tool functionality to it as well.
To sum it up, my contributions to this tool are:
1. Better Job Name to start with. 2. Better Description including “Project Name” and “Scene Name” for better job tracking. 3. Added an option to Distribute Tiles as multiple jobs. 4. Multiple Frame Range input. 5. Auto generation of frame ranges for submitting Missing Frames. 6. Ability to change Output Resolution. 7. Calculatiing total number of frames and tasks. 8. Default timeout changed. 9. Added support for SolidAngle’s Arnold. 10. Backburner For Maya now can list other registered renderers correctly as well. 11. Better layout.
You can download the performExportToBackburner.zip file and extract it, put the .mel file in Maya’s scripts folder and your done. It will replace the old tool’s functionality so when you choose Create Backburner Job… from Render menu inside Maya the new one will run.
I’ve made some changes to the UI as well that you may find it a bit unfamiliar so I’ll explain them here.
1. The Generate buttons:
They simply regenerate the Job Name and the Description which are based on scene name, Render Settings’s Version option, Project Name and Scene path.
2. Frame Range:
It simply allows you to send multiple frame ranges at once. You can enter something like this:
17,21-36,44,112-140,202
To specify a range you have to use “-“ (dash) and to separate two ranges you have to use “,” (Comma)
Also you have to avoid using spaces or any character other than Numbers, Dash and Comma.
Next to the frame range text box there is a number which shows the total amount of frames, Just for fun ;).
And finally, a button that I marked with a red square around it in the above image which allows you to pick an existing frame of a sequence and then it asks you to give a frame range and then fills the Frame Range text box with the missing frames as ranges so you can only send missing frames if there are any.
3. Resolution:
You can render images with a different size other than what is set in the render settings considering the device aspect ratio.
4. Distribute Tiles:
You can divide each frame into specific number of rows and columns and send each tile as one job. This comes real handy when you want to render out the final quality very very fast or you have a huge image size or if your render far is not capable of handling an entire frame because of memory.
To merge the rendered tiles back to original image you can use Nuke or Fusion (these are the ones I know that do the job). For example in Nuke, Just import your images into nuke, select them all and press “m”. it will create a merge node and connects all of the tiles to it which also works with sequences.
Remember to set “Also merge” attribute in the merge node to “All” to have all of your embedded passes merged as well in case your image type is EXR.
That’s it. I guess the rest is very easy to get used to.
If you find any bugs, strange behavior or if you think a New Feature can make it better please feel free to write a comment and I’ll be more than happy to do my best about it.
Cheers ;)
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