Best practices

Use the last RANCHecker for Maya version

Check if the RANCHecker for Maya version on your computer are the the last one.

No special characters

Avoid all the specials characters and spaces in your the folders and files names. Only use alphanumerical sign [A..Z][a..z][0..9] and “-” or “_”.

Example:
ELETRO3D Projet/Cuisine & éléctroménager/76XDR.mb- should be written – ELETRO3D_Projet/Cuisine_and_electromenager/76XDR.mb
_{In French “Cuisine & éléctroménager” means “Kitchen & household electrical appliances”}

No differents files with the same name

Due to some features restrictions, RANCHecker could gather in a same folder files with same format.
When the VUA will be unzipped, files with the same names run the risk to be crushed.
So it is a mandatory to distinguish them with differents names.

Test your rendering

Before sending a full frame range on the RANCH realised a test.
For an animation, between 3 to 15 significants images in full resolution.
For a more than 2K still image, render your finale image in a smaller resolution.

This test is here to be sure that :

• All your assets, caches, rendering parameters produce the expected result.
• The price and rendering time fit your estimation with the estimator.

Stock all the project data in the same folder

1. Put your scene in a “scenes” folder
2. Put your textures in a “sourceimages” folder
3. Put your caches in a “cache”, then a subfolder with the type of file (ex: cache/alembic for Alembics or cache/nCache for geometry caches)

Use RANCH farm path

On the farm, your VUA archive is unzipped at: C:/Maya/Currentjob

Maya tends to block modifications on some paths of your external files noticely for caches. To avoid those blocking we recommend to use the farm path.

Clean your scene

Working relics can remained in your scene and disturb the rendering process.
To avoid that, save your scene under a new name and perform the following cleanups:

• Click on the square beside “File > Optimize Scene size” and select what you want to optimize (verify after optimisation that your animation still works)
• Go to Hypershade > Rendering tab and delete “defaultRenderLayer” duplicate copies (often with a namespace or a number at the end)
• Go to Edit > Delete All by type > Non-deformer History or perform Alt+shift+D on specific meshes that you know you won’t break features.

Verify your archive

The VUA archive created by RANCHecker is actually a ZIP file renamed in “.vua”.
So you can verified its content and insert manually missing files following those quick steps :

• Open archive with 7zip tool (right-click > open with: 7zip manager)
• Vérify that your archive has the folders “scenes” and “sourceimages” as well as RANCHecker.info, RANCHecker.log, renderer_detected.txt
• If your rendering is a still image: the file SingleNode.txt
• If you have caches (except ASS): a “cache” with corresponding subfolders(alembic, nCache, vdb, proxy)
• If you have IES: and “IES” folder
• If you used XGen: an “Xgen” folder and the files .xgen and .abc being in the “scenes” folder
• If there is missing assets, you can simply drag and drop them at the right location.