In another word, we can change the material deliberately before the assignment happens and then change it back. However, I find out that the material assignment can succeed only when the given material changes. It turns out the assignment can be working only on the first layer when you try to assign the same material on a bunch of layers - this is an absolutely chaos in the automation process. This is normally not be difficult by selecting the material and capturing the MEL console output: ‘sets -e -forceElement yourMaterialSG ’īut it will not be working when batch material assignment per layer. The next problem will be material setting. pm.PyNode(‘renderLayerManager.crl’).set(renderLayerID)

The attribute can accept render layer ID as an input which can be found by: renderlayerNode = pm.PyNode(renderLayerName) renderLayerID = ()īy setting the ‘crl’ attribute, Maya engine will update the UI selection once it becomes dirty. ma file again, we can understand the layer highlighting is actually controlled by ‘crl’ attribute in a global Maya Node ‘renderLayerManager’. The 1st thing we need to do is to convert the operation ‘highlight render layer’ to script. Then apply the material on selected submesh. The manual way of doing those is to create a render layer and highlight the layer.

Solution: We do that manually and try to replicate the operation by script. However, creating a material layer override on individual submesh is not the same as the attribute layer override. We can also query the override attribute on the selected layer by: pm.editRenderLayerAdjustment(q=1,alg=1)ģ. Solution: we follow the same way above and then find out the MEL script generated by Maya, which can be translated into python with code: pm.PyNode('defaultRenderGlobals').t(path)Īnd override with: pm.editRenderLayerAdjustment('defaultRenderGlobals.imageFilePrefix', layer = layerName) Figure 7: we need to override ‘File name prefix’ and ‘Renderable Camera’ per layer to automate the process.

Arnold maya batch render