Your scene file determines whether you render a single frame or an animation. You can render from a shell or a command line. Before rendering, you may want to close all applications, including Maya, to maximize the amount of memory available for rendering.
If you have not set up command-line rendering for your platform, see Set up command line rendering
When you render from a command line, you can set flags that override some of the Render Settings, saving time during test renders.
When rendering with Arnold for Maya, you can render a sequence of frames interactively without using the command line renderer. See Render a sequence of frames interactively.
If you perform command line rendering with Arnold for Maya, your images will appear with a watermark. To render images without a watermark, purchase Arnold batch render nodes from Solid Angle; or use your preferred 3rd party renderer.
To get quick renderer-specific information
Render -r rendername -help
where rendername is the name of the renderer.
Use the following options:
To use the command line renderer, you must include the path as part of the command; for example: "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya<version>\bin\Render.exe" -r sw <filename>. You cannot simply navigate to the \bin directory from the command line and run Render.exe -r sw <filename>. On Windows, you can avoid having to type the path each time by setting your PATH environment variable to include the path to your \bin directory. For more information see Set up command line rendering.
To obtain a complete list of command line Render options, from a shell or command line
All flags have a short description. Each flag corresponds to the appropriate section of the Render Settings window. See the Render Settings documentation for more detailed information on each option.
To render from the command line
At the command prompt, shell, or Terminal window, type:
Render -r <renderer name> <options> <filename>
where <renderer name> is the name of the renderer, as shown above for getting Help.
where <filename> is (generally) a Maya ASCII or Maya Binary file, and <options> is one or more of the options or flags.
This renders the image or animation using the renderer you specify in the command line.
Render <options> <filename>
This renders the image or animation using the renderer defined in the file.
For descriptions of the common command-line renderer flags, see Common flags for the command line renderer.
For descriptions of the renderer-specific command-line renderer flags, see Renderer-specific flags for the command line renderer.
To render a scene with a specific renderer from a shell or command line
Render <options> -proj <proj path> scene
An example is as follows:
/Applications/Autodesk/maya2016/Maya.app/Contents/bin/Render -r sw -v 5 -proj /Users/username/Documents/maya/projects/default /Users/username/Documents/maya/projects/default/myScene.ma
In this example, Maya renders into the images directory specified after the -proj flag.
To render a scene with the renderer specified in the file from a shell or command line
Type: Render -r file
To batch render using user-defined region rendering
render -r sw -reg 0 100 0 100 scene.ma
where -reg 0 100 0 100 indicates the region to be rendered in pixels (left, right, bottom, top).
The above command renders the lower left 100 x100 pixel region of the scene.