D7 not respecting 3dsmax filename - adding . before padding

joconnell · January 21, 2015, 6:29pm

Heya Folks!

We’ve just popped in deadline 7.0.0.54 R and we’re finding one oddity with it - when I output a file such as “deadline_test_.exr” from max I expect to get deadline_test_001.exr deadline_test_002.exr deadline_test_003.exr out the other side. What I’m getting though is an extra period in the filename so deadline_test_.001.exr deadline_test_.002.exr deadline_test_.003.exr is coming out.

I’ve turned off everything in the 3dsmax pathing options in the submitter - any ideas why the change? I presume that deadline 7 loads up your old deadline 6 max submission options as my previous ones were already set.

Cheers!

John

dwallbridge · January 21, 2015, 6:48pm

Hello John,

First, we would definitely recommend making sure you are on the latest build, which is 7.0.2.3. As for your issue, this is something that only recently came up, but I am going to quote from the ticket, which one of our product experts responded to.

In order to avoid some cases where auto-naming in VRay/RenderElements was causing troubles in other pipelines, we introduced a new delimiter option which defaults to period “.”.
It is controlled by the parameter SMTDSettings.Delimiter and is NOT exposed to the UI, but can be tweaked company-wide via the Repository defaults.

In order to override it for the whole company, all you need to do is go to your Repository folder, navigate to \Submission\3dsMax\Main\ and edit the file “SubmitMaxToDeadline_Defaults.ini”

Under the existing section
[RenderingOptions]
add the line
Delimiter=

Make sure there is nothing after the = sign. Save the file.

If you prefer to insert an Underscore character automatically, you would say for example
[RenderingOptions]
Delimiter=_

The Delimiter setting is NEVER sticky, so this change would automatically bring back SMTD to its original behavior for all users on your network. Once you restart the submitter, it should start using the new setting.

I hope that helps.

Cheers,

Bobo · January 21, 2015, 6:51pm

We have introduced a new Delimiter option in SMTD (3ds Max only) to avoid some problems with the way render elements and other auto-generated names were formatted. The Delimiter option is set to a factory default of “.” as this is the typical convention in VFX pipelines, but of course it can be overridden via the Defaults INI file in the Repository.

Since this setting is considered a company-wide pipeline value and should not be overridden by individual users, it is currently not exposed in the SMTD UI.

To change the Delimiter to empty string (or underscore, or anything really), you can do the following:
*Navigate to the Repository
*Go to \submission\3dsmax\main
*Locate the SubmitMaxToDeadline_Defaults.ini file and open it in a text editor
*Add the following to the [RenderingOptions] category:

[RenderingOptions] Delimiter=

*Make sure there is nothing after the = sign!
*Save the file
*Restart SMTD on any of your workstations

RESULT: At this point, SMTD should behave like it did in Deadline 6.x and earlier, but in some cases some (VRAY) render element passes might be misformatted due to the lack of delimiter (this was a known bug in 6.x). For example, if a pass is named based on a TextureMap name ending with digits, the resulting file name could end up having a really bad trailing digits, e.g SomeMap_420000.exr instead of SomeMap_42.0000.exr. So in the Deadline Monitor, the filename might get hashed as SomeMap_######.exr instead of SomeMap_42.####.exr.

I am going to add a FAQ entry about this ASAP.

joconnell · January 22, 2015, 10:45am

Much appreciated for the help, you’re all lovely people