Maya Job type and By Frame Less than One

[jbrandibas]

We have a sequence that we need to render and we are using a frame step less than one to achieve a slow motion effect.  If we batch render locally, Maya generates the appropriate number of frames, but the farm does nothing but by frame 1.

For instance, i did a small test with an animated sphere over 24 frames.  If I render locally and set my render settings to be

Start Frame 1
End Frame 24
By Frame .5

I get 48 frames rendered (frame numbers 1 - 48) with the animation at half speed.  However, if I submit this job to qube I only get the 24 frames, none of the half frames.

I figured that maybe qube was having trouble with fractional frames, so I changed the by frame to 2, which would cause it to render a sequence that ran double time.  This worked as expected and gave me twelve frames.

I guess my question would be, is there a way to submit a job to qube that will render fractional frames like the batch render does?

Thanks,

[shinya]

Hi-

Unfortunately, the Maya (or any range-type) jobtype currently does not support fractional steps, and the best workaround would be to do as what you did.

[RESIDENT_CREATIVE]

Has anyone found a solution for this yet?  I can't find a way to render "by frame" with anything less than "1" with Maya 2011 OSX + Qube 6.1.3, unless I render local ...

[BrianK]

For anyone else who might have the same question, neither the maya job type nor the maya batch job allow fractional frame steps - at least not when processed on more than one computer. 

Fractional frames will work if processed by only one machine, in one chunk or partition (one agenda item for the whole render), so if one wanted to offload a render from their machine, they could.

As it sits now, however, distributed rendering of fractional frames is not supported for Maya.

If others find that they would use this feature, speak up!  Either add to this post or write in to support. 

[joed8349]

Can't you render 1 job as say frames 1-24 (by 1 frame step), and then create a 2nd job by changing Maya's render settings to start at frame .5 and render by 1 frame step?
This would render at frames .5, 1.5, 2.5, ... 23.5

Then just combine all 48 rendered images.

I couldn't test this with Qube at the moment.