In a moment of frustration, have you ever un-checked the “Show this dialog” option for the NVIDIA DDS Read Properties in Adobe Photoshop? I have. After doing so, I have realized that it’s not an obvious task to get this handy dialog back. Turns out, it’s a quick 2-step process, as long as you know where to look.

What we want:

This is the dialog that should appear when opening a .dds file in Adobe Photoshop. However, if you’re like me, you’ve unchecked the “Show this dialog” checkbox and you don’t see this anymore.

How to get it:

Step 1: In Photoshop, create a new dummy image (any size, any specs you want). Now save it as a .dds file like so:

Step 2: The DDS Formatting options dialog will now appear. Click the “Read Config” button and voila, you’ll have your DDS Read Properties Dialog back. From there, it’s a simple click to force the NVIDIA plug-in to show the DDS Read Properties Dialog whenever you load a .dds format image.

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I enjoy animating in Maya, but for some reason I tend to occasionally get extraordinarily lengthy render times when using batch render mode (depending on what hardware/software combination I’m using). For example, a file that yields ~4 second single render times can take up to 50 seconds per frame in batch render mode. Unable to find a fix for this problem in the Maya help docs or on the internet, I searched for an alternative. Reading up a bit, I found that many people experience better performance using the Maya command line renderer.

Yes, rendering without clicking a button. As an artist, I know this can sound daunting. But fear not. It’s both easy and fast.

Where other tutorials offer explanations of either beginner-frightening detail or extraneous info, let me give you just the basics you’ll need to render out a single scene from a single camera.

For this demo, I’ll use a file called myMayaFile.mb located in the C:\ root. The command line renderer will output in the format (video or image sequence) with the parameters (quality, size, etc) that you last saved. So, make sure your render settings are all correct, save the file, and close Maya. That’s right, close it.

Now, pop open the windows command prompt. This can be done by hitting the key combination of WindowsKey + “r” or by simply clicking into your start menu and selecting “Run…” From there, type in “cmd” (no quotes) and hit enter. A command prompt will pop up.

From here, you’ll want to get to the directory where your Maya file is stored. Our file is “C:\myMayaFile.mb,” so we’ll want to change to the C:\ directory. This can be done in the command prompt by typing “cd C:\” (without quotes).

Now for the magic. Usually, apps that run from the command line allow you to specify options that you would like used. In this basic example, we want to specify a start frame (1), end frame (300), target filename (myRender), target directory (c:\renders), and Maya source file (myMayaFile.mb).

Here’s what it will look like, and I’ll explain below:
C:\>render -n 0 -s 1 -e 300 -im myRender -rd c:\renders myMayaFile.mb

Now, piece by piece:
“render” – This launches the Maya command line renderer
“-n 0” – Tells renderer to use all available processors. If you only want to use 1 CPU, you could substitute “-n 1″
“-s 1” – Tells renderer to start on frame 1
“-e 300” – Tells renderer to end on frame 300
“-im myRender” – Depending on your render settings from the last time you saved your Maya source file, you’ll get an image sequence or a movie file. So, your images would most likely be something like “myRender001.tga,” “myRender002.tga” and so on. Whereas a movie file would be something like “myRender.avi.”
“-rd c:\renders” Tells renderer to put your resulting render (images or movie) into the c:\renders directory. This directory can be anywhere you want, but be careful to use a path without spaces. The Maya command line utility will not work properly with spaces in file names or paths (as far as I know).
“myMayaFile.mb” – Tells renderer to use myMayaFile.mb as the source file from which to create the final render. Again, this can be any file in the directory, so long as it does not have spaces in its filename.

Hit enter, and away we go. You’ll soon see another benefit of the command line renderer: You get a nice little print out of the time and memory usage required for each frame. I’ve read that there is a significant memory saving when using the command line renderer, but I have not done enough extensive testing to verify this yet. So, your mileage may vary.

There you have it folks. Batch rendering with Maya. Fast, effective, and relatively easy to set up. For further reading on how to control nearly every aspect of a batch render directly from the command line, you can hit the Maya docs or click here. Also, if you’d like to learn about writing windows batch scripts to handle things like rendering from multiple cameras or multiple scenes all in a simple double-click, you can check out Brian Immel’s Batch Rendering Multiple Maya Files tutorial.

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