Hi,
I’ve noticed that when a 3dsmax file that has a 3dsmax region already set is loaded, running the submit to deadline script ignores this and just uses whatever has been specified before, resulting in it rendering the wrong region.
Is this a bug, or am I just doing it wrong? 
Thanks.
-Jaime
Let’s call this a “known limitation”.
Submit Max To Deadline (SMTD) offers 4 different region/tile rendering modes. All of them rely on forcing a region rendering internally to produce the tiles to be assembled, or the actual 3ds Max region rendering. Thus, they all completely ignore and override what a 3ds Max scene is set to, and currently require the user to go into the SMTD Tiles tab and dictate the settings from there. In fact, the SMTD Tile settings reset themselves by default back to “FULL FRAME Rendering, All Region Options DISABLED” each time the tool is opened.
We are aware that this can be confusing. The optimal way to handle this would be to store all scene-related SMTD settings with the Max file itself. So if you loaded a Max scene, set up some SMTD settings, submitted a job, then saved the scene, all SMTD sticky settings would be baked into the scene itself and not into the current INI file that enforces stickiness. If you reopened the scene later, SMTD should restore its settings to whatever they were when the scene was saved. So if you set up a region and enabled it via the SMTD Tiles tab > “3DS MAX REGION Rendering, Single Job, Frames As Tasks” mode, it would switch itself back to that mode.
In theory, if a MAX file was set to Region Rendering and there were no SMTD settings stored in that scene, SMTD could respect the region settings of the Render Scene dialog and enable the “3DS MAX REGION Rendering, Single Job, Frames As Tasks” mode, too.
I am actually working on implementing a prototype of this scene-file-sticky-settings mechanism right now, but it is not available in a Deadline release or even a Beta build yet. I will keep your comment in mind and possibly enable region rendering in SMTD if the loaded Max file had it on, but had no SMTD settings stored in it. We also need to make sure the user is made aware of any scene-specific settings that were applied automatically without his knowledge - rendering a region when a whole frame is expected is a worse mistake than rendering a whole frame where only a region was required…
Note that the “Use 3ds Max Region” checkbox you underlined does not enable region rendering, but simply tells Deadline to use the corner values of the 3ds Max region. You need to select the “3DS MAX REGION Rendering, Single Job, Frames As Tasks” option from the drop-down list on top of the panel to enable 3ds Max region rendering!
Thanks for the feedback!
