Tried to find a similar issue on here but to no avail.
With the latest Deadline 10 installed, I cannot seem to find the old option “DO NOT SAVE And Use Current Scene’s ORIGINAL NETWORK PATH” under the scene file submission options dropdown. That said, it’s still mentioned as part of the help menu still (https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/products/deadline/10.0/1_User%20Manual/manual/app-3ds-max-smtd.html). So I am not sure if this option was removed from the dropdown menu by accident or have I overlooked my settings? If that’s the case, could someone point me to the place or any workaround?
The option was removed for several good reasons (one of them being it shouldn’t have been added to the submitter in the first place)…
The option originally allowed a very fast submission to Deadline where the MAX file was not saved at all, and all changes to its settings (e.g. renderer properties, output paths etc.) would be captured solely by the job’s metadata.
However, this option would have produced incorrect results in a lot of cases where the scene content MUST be saved to the .MAX file before submission. It would have been up to the user to predict if the current set of options in the submitter would lead to a problem or not, so we felt it was too risky to keep it around. I feel bad even about the option to Save to the original MAX file, it is never a good idea to let a script overwrite the scene you just opened…
We should update the documentation to remove the option from there too, thanks for the pointer!
If you absolutely need to submit without saving, you would have to write a custom SMTD Workflow and implement the submission logic yourself.
May I ask why you want to use that option? Is it submission speed, or something else?
Yes, it’s mostly dealing with the submission time on a heavy scene. Do you happen to have a suggestion or workaround that would help aside from optimizing the scenes themselves?
Again, it would be possible to write a simple submission workflow that does not require saving, but this would ignore a few SMTD features like merging XRefs on submission, copying assets with the job etc.
Alternatively, since the code for the missing mode was only removed from the UI, not from the backend functions, it would be also possible to reinstate in the UI script from an older version of Deadline.