Using render tokens in Maya - quick tips

When you have to render an animation and probably you have to manage a huge quantity of files and images, you should know how to use the so-called "render tokens" in Maya, and how to manage the destination folders of your renders.

Using Mental Ray as Maya Renderer, and opening the Maya Render Settings, you can find a "Common" tab, through which you can manage the output of your files.

By default, Maya saves the output of its rendering process in the subfolder "images" of the project. In order to create a new folder (e.g. testFolder) inside the "images" one, you have to insert before the name of the output file the name of the new folder, followed by a slash (e.g. testFolder/).

By clicking the right mouse button over the File name prefix box, you can choose which "render token" will be included in the name of the output file, or use the "render token" to create a new folder.

"Render tokens" include informations about RenderLayer, RenderCamera, Date, Time, RenderPass, ...

The following image will explain better the whole thing.


In this case, I chose to create a new subfolder called "testFolder" inside the default output render "images" folder. Each file produced includes also the informations about the RenderLayer to which the image belongs. For example, the first output file will be saved in this path: "../images/testFolder/colorPass_test_anim_1.iff".