After many hours of searching for this answer, I ended up finding out that you can start maya as an interactive shell. By doing this, I was able to source a script as I opened it, and run whatever I want into memory as If I had Maya open at the time.
/Applications/Autodesk/maya2014/Maya.app/Contents/MacOS/maya -prompt -script "/Volumes/raid/farm_script/setupRender.mel"
In the setupRender.mel
file, I was able to assign variables, containing options for renders etc, in doing this, I was also able to create a global variable for the frame number, and increment it during the preFrame callback, like so:
int $startFrame = 100;
int $endFrame = 1110;
global int $frameCount = 0;
string $preRenderStatistics = "'global int $frameCount; $frameCount = " + $startFrame + ";'";
string $preFrameStatistics = "'print(\"Rendering frame: \" + $frameCount++)'";
string $additionalFlags = "";
string $sceneFilePath = "'/Volumes/path/to/file/intro_video_001.mb'";
system("Render -preRender " + $preRenderStatistics + " -preFrame " + $preFrameStatistics + " -s " + $startFrame + " -e " + $endFrame + " -x " + $additionalFlags + " " + $sceneFilePath);
This is a very simplified version of what I currently have, but hopefully this will help others if they stumble across it.