While submitting a batch job containing 4 camera views through 3ds CMD, can we have those views shared amongst available slaves.
I noticed that the entire job is being rendered in one slave i.e., one view after the other is rendered and not shared amongst the available slaves…
Please pardon my ignorance if I am asking something thats very obvious.
Don’t worry, it is not exactly obvious - I have been around Deadline since 2004 and I did not know the answer from top of my heard. Mainly because I have never used 3dsCmd. So I had to look at the code.
The Batch Render support in 3dsCmd is completely dependent on how Autodesk has implemented that option in 3dsmaxcmd.exe Deadline simply provides a command line argument -batchRender which can either have no value, resulting in all views being rendered, or a view name (e.g. -batchRender View01) which results in rendering the specific view.
The Batch Render support (and State Sets support) in the 3dsMax plugin (using the SMTD submitter) on the other hand takes the active views in the Batch Dialog (or the State Sets in that dialog), and submits individual jobs grouped in the Deadline Monitor using a command Batch name. So if you have an animation of 101 frames and 5 active Batch Render dialog views, each one of them will become a separate job with its own tasks, and you can control more precisely what machines render what tasks.
Thank you @Bobo for your quick response, we are currently using the SMTD, its taking a time (pushing about 5-8 cameras/views) as it does a pre calculation of all the views on the client before submitting to the render slave and this is a time consuming activity particularly in a Work From Home set up through the VPN.
Is there any way we can have the SMTD do the calculations on the
You can try submitting a single job to Deadline that spawns the Batch Jobs:
Alternatively, if all you want to do is multi-camera submission, you might want to try out my Multi Camera Submission workflow. It has no support for Scene States or Render Presets, but it saves the scene only once, and then submits many jobs with the same scene, while overriding the camera and render output paths.
Thank you @Bobo, I was able to push the file using the Multi-Camera to Deadline and its taking the same 30mins for 5 cameras. We are in a Work From Home due to the pandemic, is there any way to be able to submit a master job(of 5 cameras) and then have those spawned to available servers.
Did you read my previous reply carefully? Did you try the “Master Job” option in Batch Submission?
It is supposed to submit one job to Deadline, which then spawns the 5 render jobs on the farm.
Yes, but for that we need to have a license on the slave also. 
I wrote a 3dsmaxbatch plugin a few weeks ago. It should be able to run any MAXScript code without a license. It should be possible to rewrite the Master Job spawning the render jobs to use that.
In fact, the hardest part will be rewriting SMTD to use the 3dsmaxbatch plugin and pass the right arguments to it, as it does not rely on the same Lightning.dlx plugin to get a MAXScript interface to Deadline.
Correction - the simplest way would be to write a dedicated SMTD Workflow that simply sends the one job that will spawn all render jobs using the license-free 3dsmaxbatch.exe.
I am quite busy this morning, but might have time in the afternoon (Pacific Time Zone) to write something like that…
OK, my first Proof Of Concept script it worked pretty well.
As a pre-requisite, you must first install the 3dsmaxbatch plugin I posted on this forum a month ago:
The new Workflow depends mainly on the plugin definition, but the 3dsmaxbatch integration also comes with an SMTD Workflow.
After following the instructions for installing the 3dsmaxbatch plugin, download the ZIP file below and copy both files it contains into the \DeadlineRepository\submission\3dsmax\Main\Workflows\ folder.
SMTDWorkflow_BatchRenderSpawner_20210611.zip (5.7 KB)
The new Batch Render Spawner SMTD Workflow uses the same 3dsmaxbatch plugin, but provides a dedicated Workflow UI inside of the SMTD panel:
All you need to do is define one or more active Views in the Batch Render dialog of 3ds Max, and submit a job to Deadline. The Job will run 3dsmaxbatch.exe with a custom MAXScript which will load the SMTD Functions and execute the SpawnBatchJobs() function to create a group of jobs to render the active views. No 3ds Max license will be consumed when spawning the jobs.
The Submit button will be disabled if the Batch Render dialog has no active views.
Note that currently ALL Spawner Job Settings also apply to the Render Jobs - pools, groups, limits, submit as suspended, etc. In the future I might add separate controls to have unique values for the Spawner job and the resulting Render jobs.
I am getting this error message.
And I could not find the 3dsmaxbatch.exe in the repository or the slave max folder.
Please pardon my ignorance if I am missing something very obvious.
The 3dsmaxbatch.exe executable was developed by Autodesk and should be in the same folder as the 3dsmax.exe - by default it is under C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2018. However if you installed 3ds Max on a different drive, it would be at that location.
What do you see when you open the Tools menu in Super User mode, go to Configure Plugins and look at the regular 3dsmax plugin? Where does it look for the 3dsmax.exe of v2018? If the path is not the default one, you will have to select the 3dsmaxbatch plugin in the same dialog and add the correct path to the 3ds Max 2018 text field (and if you have other versions of 3ds Max, you need to make sure they are configured properly too).
I checked my ancient installation of 3ds Max 2018, and the 3dsmaxbatch.exe was there as expected, right next to the 3dsmax.exe.
Note that 3dsmaxbatch.exe was introduced for the first time in 3ds Max 2018, it did not exist in 2017 and earlier, and it changed somewhat between the original build and the subsequent Product Updates, so it might require the latest Product Update of 2018 to function properly.
Was checking in the mean time, we are running the Max2018 and Autodesk has released the maxbatch from 2018.4 like you had mentioned.
Thank you for helping on this.
Regards,
Srikanth
