Render Autodesk Maya scenes on Deadline Cloud

The maya_cli_render job bundle renders a Maya software renderer scene with the Maya CLI Render command. It runs one task per frame using an Open Job Description parameter space and restricts execution to Linux workers through host requirements.

The bundle includes a sample scene with falling gears that uses the Bullet physics plugin, along with instructions for creating similar scenes. The maya_arnold_ass_export_render bundle is a related two-step pipeline: a single export task opens the Maya scene with mayapy and writes per-frame Arnold .ass files, then a render step distributes per-frame kick tasks across workers. Job attachments automatically synchronizes the exported .ass files from the export worker to the render workers.

To run these bundles, your queue needs Maya available through a queue environment. The maya conda recipes in the samples repository build conda packages you can publish to your queue's S3 conda channel. The maya-mtoa recipes also provide the kick binary used by the export-and-render pipeline.

Submit the bundle:

deadline bundle gui-submit maya_cli_render/

For an example that exports .ass files from Maya and renders them in a single job, use:

deadline bundle submit maya_arnold_ass_export_render/ \
    -p MayaSceneFile=path-to-scene.ma \
    -p Frames=1-100 \
    -p OutputDir=path-for-outputs

For more information about job bundles, see Open Job Description (OpenJD) templates for Deadline Cloud.