On some scenes, when I open them in 3ds max the SMTD settings are getting overwritten.
Can this be turned off? Where does it reads those values from? Does it previously saves them in the .max file?
I’m not sure offhand. Which settings in particular are being reset? I can work backward from the UI if you can give me a few examples.
The Group setting, and some others.
After some reading here https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/products/deadline/10.0/1_User%20Manual/manual/app-3ds-max-smtd-advanced.html
It seems that deadline10 saves the settings in the .max file, so my question is can this feature be turned off?
I dont want to overwrite the default settings with settings from the .max file.
Absolutely, you can disable the loading of ANY property via the SubmitMaxToDeadline_ExcludeFromSceneStorage.ini file.
Open the file, and under the [JobSettings] category, add a new line
[JobSettings]
Group=true
When an SMTDSettings property name is set to TRUE in this INI file, the value will NOT be loaded from the .max file. If the property is not listed, or is explicitly set to FALSE, it will be loaded from the .max file.
There are some internal properties that are already excluded by default and cannot be loaded from the .max even if you wanted to.
Note that despite what the name of the INI file implies, it does not control what gets SAVED, but what gets LOADED. So all SMTDSettings properties are always saved with the MAX file, but only the ones allowed to load via the INI file or the hard-coded exclusion list will be loaded. So if you changed your mind and changed Group=false a month later, old scenes will correctly load the Group used when the MAX file was submitted.
Once you have excluded a property from loading, you can use the other INI files to decide whether the value should be sticky or not, and if not, what the default should be.
Again taking Group as example, the value is Sticky By Default (you can open the Tools > “Defaults and Sticky Settings Browser” in SMTD to check the Stickiness value). This means that if you open SMTD, the Group will be set to the last value the user selected from the drop-down list in a previous SMTD session. In other words, it is “set and forget”, it will stick to that value until the artist changes it again manually.
I personally prefer Group to be restored from the scene, because each job has different Group requirements in some pipelines (depending on how you are using Groups, of course).
But let’s say that you want every 3ds Max artist in your studio to always submit to a “3dsmax” group. In that case you can open the file SubmitMaxToDeadline_StickySettings.ini and add a line
[JobSettings]
Group=false
With this, you are telling SMTD that Group is not sticky. It will thus default to the factory default of “none”, and in the Browser you will see “Not Sticky - Global INI” in purple.
At this point, you can open the file SubmitMaxToDeadline_Defaults.ini and add a line like
[JobSettings]
Group=3dsmax
At this point, the non-sticky value of Group will default to “3dsmax” for all artists. They can still change it manually before submission to anything they want, but if they reopen SMTD, it will go back to “3dsmax”.
We do NOT have a control file to lock down (gray out) controls so the user cannot change them. I have considered it, but right now it is only possible in SMTD Workflows, not in the default catch-all workflow.
If you have any questions, please let me know.
2 Likes