Hi,
we have recently installed and are testing if Deadline is to be our new rendermanager of choice.
We are on Windows environment and currently testing it with 3dsmax 2023.2.2 and V-Ray 6.00.20 (HF3).
We have our own inhouse passmanager/rendersender which handles scenes, shots, passes and submission to our current rendermanager (RoyalRender).
So we are building our own submitter using the SMTD.functions - approach for Deadline as well.
Question:
Can Deadline launch 3dsmax as a service and render jobs in the background?
Right now we get like a greyed out 3dsmax window and the V-Ray Frame Buffer shows while a task is rendering.
We have looked around in the forums and seen some posts from people that seem to have 3dsmax rendering as a service via deadline but not anything about how they managed to do it.
Thanks!
/Andreas
Hello!
Deadline should be running the render process in command line and shouldn’t start the 3ds Max UI. You might be submitting the 3ds Max job with forcing to start in Workstation Mode which will open the 3ds Max UI and will need a license to render.
Here is the setting in 3ds Max SMTD Job Option rollout referenced from the documentation:
https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/products/deadline/10.3/1_User%20Manual/manual/app-3ds-max-smtd.html#job-options-rollout
Force Workstation Mode checkbox
- When unchecked, 3ds Max will be started in Worker mode without the User Interface, which does not require a 3ds Max license.
- When checked, 3ds Max will be launched in full Interactive mode and will require a license.
- Used mainly for testing and debugging purposes and should be left unchecked.
I hope this will solve the issue with 3ds Max launching UI.
Hi, and thank you for your reply. I think I expressed myself a bit wrong. The 3ds max UI doesn’t load fully. But it sort of semi-loads. I’ll upload a screen grab tomorrow, not at the office right now.
We don’t use the smtd-UI to submit but set certain variables using our own script using the provided smtd-structures and functions.
We have set the forceworkstationmode to false.
What does show fully however is the v-ray frame buffer. We have tried setting all the frame buffer variables to false and the frame buffer override to true. Actually I think we have tried all the combos of those frame buffer settings… it still pops up.
With our current render manager 3ds max renders as a service and you don’t see any part of the ui or frame buffer on your workstation as it renders a task via the manager. Except via the render manager client.
We would like to setup deadline in a similar fashion if possible but have yet to be successful.
/Andreas
This is how it looks for us with forceWorkstationMode = false
I guess we are a little disappointed with how much UI that loads up while a task renders, even with forceWorkstationMode = false. Maybe we are a bit picky here but we feel its annoying when these windows popup on your workstation when you are working on something else. The easy solution is to shutdown your worker client but that isn’t ideal in all situations.
What we want to know is if this is the extent to how much we can hide UI while rendering via deadline? Or is there a way to hide everything away? We are under the impression that rendering as a service would not show any UI at all but we don’t know how to set that up or if it is even possible with Deadline.
/Andreas
