I have a few questions I would like to ask. First of all, I am making a tutorial for students and faculty to use Deadline in our college. With that said, I am trying to cover every aspect that people might ask or have problems within the program.
When you get an error on the Sanity Check such as “the output is set to Movie!” What is the correct way to fix this. I want to render a movie, but it gives me an error. 3DS Max will not give me the option to render to a .mov, so do I choose to render the active time segment as .jpg and deadline will create the .mov when I check the box in QTime? What is the correct way to render an animation from Max using Deadline?
Is there a way to alter the Sanity check to not give certain errors? I would just want to get rid of a few errors such as “no camera” and other ones that do not really make a difference. I know you can uncheck those errors, but I’m trying to make it dummy proof for students.
Thank you, I’m sure i’ll be asking other questions later.
Stephen
Max will let me render an animation as .avi, but not .mov.
Direct movie rendering with 3dsmax and Deadline doesn’t really work because Deadline always tells Max to render one frame at a time. For example, on a 5 frame task, Deadline will issue 5 separate render commands to 3dsmax. If you render to a movie format, this results in a movie file being created for each frame.
We are aware of this limitation, but usually for 3D apps like Max, you want to split up your renders into frame sequences. The benefits are:
- Multiple machines can work on different frames of the sequence simultaneously (which isn’t possible when rendering to movie files)
- If an error occurs on a frame, only that frame needs to be re-rendered again (if you are rendering to a movie, the whole movie will have to be started from scratch)
So rendering to an image sequence and then creating the QT afterwards is definitely the recommended approach.
If you want to tweak the sanity check, you can do so by editing the SubmitMaxToDeadline_SanityCheck_General.ms file in \your\repository\submission\3dsmax. Usually, users would add additional sanity checks by editing the SubmitMaxToDeadline_SanityCheck_Private.ms file, but since you want to remove out-of-the-box ones, you need to edit the general file. However, you may still find this tutorial helpful:
thinkboxsoftware.com/news/20 … ecker.html
Cheers,
Thanks Russel,
I’ll test it to see if it is working for us.
Ryan or anyone else viewing,
We were able to get the Deadline Monitor to generate a quicktime movie after it was done rendering. Is there a way besides making a script to tell Deadline to take the image files and make a movie after it is finished with all of the frames?
Automatically instead of doing it by telling it to make the movie. We would like it to be more like you just check a box and it completes the job and movie together. Is this possible without making a script? The box to Generate a .mov in the QTime tab doesn’t really seem to be doing anything.
The QTime tab in the max submitter should be submitting a separate, dependent job that will create a QT from the original job’s images. Do you see this 2nd job showing up in the Monitor at all?
Also, which version of Deadline are you using? If you’re using Deadline 5, you can also use an Event Plugin to generate QT movies from any rendered job. We have an example here:
thinkboxsoftware.com/deadlin … on_Example
This requires writing a script, but the example already gives you a template, and you can easily customize it to suit your specific needs.
Cheers,
The only time it submits a second job is when we change it to use the Fusion Quicktime generator. Then we get an error because we don’t have Fusion and probably not going to use it. When we use the " Use Quicktime 7 or higher" option, it will not submit a second job automatically. We have to go to Submit within the Monitor and go to the Quicktime option and select the first image file.
So we are able to genereate a movie, but not automatically. I’ll see what I can do with editing the scripts.
Thanks agin! Any other info would be very helpful.
If you’re using v5.0, here’s a pre-built event plugin for QuickTime generation based on Ryan’s code:
viewtopic.php?f=57&t=5395
Just change the line in the py file from looking for a “nuke” plugin job to a “3dsmax” job type and then all 3dsmax jobs will get a Quicktime generated.
HTH,
Mike
Yes, I’m using Deadline 5. I forgot to mention that. Thanks Mike!
Thank you both, it works!
That’s great!
We’ve logged the QT issue you mentioned in the Max submitter. We’ll see if we can reproduce. Although to be honest, now that we have the Event plugins, I’m tempted to remove the QT feature from the Max submitter entirely. The event plugins just seem to do a better job at handling this, and they can be setup to affect all jobs, not just 3dsmax ones.
Cheers,
Please can we keep the QT-3dsMax interface. My artists like to be in control of when QT jobs are submitted with a Max job.
Alright, we’ll keep it in. 