Im facing the need to batch render with arnold with maya opened.
Being very fancy of the render.exe command which allows to specify multiple flags (the renderer among them) at first i relied on a "os.system('render blablablalba')" call.
This has some problems which i figure have to do with the shell environment the command is launched on. Primarily, i have a render failing because of a custom plugin node being not recognized with this specific os.system call... whereas if i run the command in a independent shell (not from the maya python interpreter) the scene renders correctly and it just simply ignores the node.
Im considering two fixing options:
(1) keep the call to os.system("render...balbalbal") and try to emulate the same environment maya has when run in GUI mode.
(2) use a batch render command of the maya.cmds api. In this case i would need as sole condition to be able to specify the render layer.
I would prefer option (2) since option (1) seems to be like reinventing the wheel but i dont have much experience with the amount of render commands available, and it seems to be quite a bunch.