We try to bake to texture several sequences in 3DS max, using the integrated Submit BAKE TEXTURES Job to Deadline, and while the process itself seem to work, there is a few issues we can’t seem to solve:
-No matter how we set the Time Output in the Render Setup Panel, it only submit frame 1
-That frame 1 renders fine, but if we Modify Frame Range through Deadline Monitor to extend the frame range, all frames after frame 1 give the same error:
Error: RenderTask: Unexpected exception (Exception caught in 3ds max: – Unable to convert: undefined to type: String
Behavior is the same with Scanline Renderer or VRAY. We tried a simple scene with a single cube and same thing happen.
BTW, the render runs fine locally in GUI, and renders all frames normally.
Maybe someone using this feature / integrated submission script have a few pointers for us.
The Bake To Texture functionality in SMTD is implemented as a MAXScript Job, not as a straight-up rendering job.
It also has an option called One Object Per Task which appears to be checked in your case (as it is the default).
When that option is checked, each Task (which usually represents 1 frame) is responsible for rendering a single texture from a single object selected for baking. It always uses frame 0, because that mode assumes that you are baking static textures without any animation. So if you selected 42 objects for baking, the Job will show 42 Tasks (0 to 41). Each task can run on a separate render node, and will bake one texture at frame 0. So if you manually edit the Job Properties to add a 43rd Task, the list of 42 objects to bake will have no 43rd entry, and cause the MAXScript error you reported, since the Tasks represent scene objects and not Frames in this mode.
If the option is unchecked, the Job should have as many Tasks as the Frames specified during the submission via the Render Setup > Time dialog. So if you set the time range to 0 to 100, you should get 101 tasks in the Job. Each of these Tasks will run the bake MAXScript which will set the frame to be rendered to the Frame associated to the task, and do a loop over the list of objects to bake, and will bake one texture per object at the current time, with a frame counter in the texture filename.
So if you have the Object Per Task option checked, try unchecking it and see if it behaves the way you expect it to. Changing the Job’s Frame range should be supported in this case.
Due to the necessity to match one object per task, we need to enforce a Chunk Size of 1 in that mode. However, there is indeed a bug in the Bake Texture workflow’s UI as it should enable the Chunk Size value when the One Object Per Task is unchecked. You can currently work around this by switching to the default Workflow, changing the Chunk Size to anything, and then switching back to the Bake Textures Workflows.
I will log the bug and see if we can fix this in the near future. If you want to know how to fix it yourself, let me know and I will give you the instructions (or will upload a fixed file here).
This SMTD functionality is more or less a hack that tries to reuse the Render To Texture feature of 3ds Max which was not exposed to MAXScript very well. So what we can do with it is very limited, and it is a wonder it does anything at all
