How to import/export Render Setup with Python

Render setup is very useful for managing render layers and it can import and export render layers for later usage. However, the information on how to import/export it in Python is quite sparse. After doing some research on our testing code, I found that it is quite easy.

There is renderSetup.decode and renderSetup.encode for import and export, respectively.

The prototype for decode is  decode(jsonObject, importOption, optionalPrefix), where
 - the jsonObject is the json string you'll need to import;
 - the importOption could be one of the DECODE_AND_RENAME, DECODE_AND_MERGE, DECODE_AND_OVERWRITE value which you could find in the import dialogue;
 - the optionalPrefix is the prepend string and it could be None (if you don't want a prefix) and it is only working with DECODE_AND_RENAME option.

The export command is easier, as it has only one parameter called Note. This valie can be “None” if you do not want to provide a Note.

import maya.app.renderSetup.model.renderSetup as renderSetup

import json

def importRenderSetup(filename):
    with open(filename, "r") as file:
        renderSetup.instance().decode(json.load(file), renderSetup.DECODE_AND_OVERWRITE, None)
 
def exportRenderSetup(filename, note = None):
    with open(filename, "w+") as file:
        json.dump(renderSetup.instance().encode(note), fp=file, indent=2, sort_keys=True)

You can use above code snippet to import/export your render setup in Maya.