We've seen some really poor turnaround with short (~30sec) brazil-rendered frames on our render farm. Brazil spends about 2-3 minutes loading up on a slave before it renders each frame and then purges its memory footprint before ramping up for the next frame in the task.
I'm wondering if anyone knows of some switch that 3dsmax or deadline is passing to brazil that forces it to binge/purge/reload between each frame in a task.
When I render the same short particle effect sequence locally with a 3dsmax workstation, Brazil does not take 2 minutes to binge/purge between each frame and the sequence will render in a 10th of the time. Brazil loads once and retains its memory footprint, which is the desired behaviour.
This 2-3 minute load/reload between frames doesn't happen with 3dsmax/scanline using deadline and multiple frames per task... just Brazil R/S.
Has anyone encountered this before? Obviously it's only a problem with short renders, but 3 minutes of overhead per frame is pretty bad and I'd like to get the slaves running optimally.
Hi Mike,
In the max submission dialog, check if the restart 3dsmax between frames option is checked. This would cause max to be reloaded between frames. If you’re using the old submission dialog, the option is called “Force Restart of Renderer Between Frames”. If your using v2.0 of the submission dialog (this is shown in the submission dialog’s title), the option is called “Restart 3ds Max Between Frames”.
If the option is unchecked, but you’re still having the problem, right-click on the job and select “Modify Properties”. Then check if the Reload Plugin Between Frames option is checked, and uncheck it if it is. This option is separate from the 3dsmax one mentioned above. It causes the entire plugin (not just max) to be reloaded between frames.
If this still doesn’t fix the problem, can you post a simple scene that reproduces the problem that we could use for testing? I tried creating a simple brazil scene with particles and I couldn’t recreate the problem - the rendering was quick between frames.
Cheers,
Ryan Russell
Frantic Films Software
http://software.franticfilms.com/
(204)949-0070
Hi Mike,
Ignore my last post. The “Restart Renderer” option is forced for brazil and vray jobs to help prevent issues with animated objects with displacement. What we’ll do is have the option in the submission dialog checked by default for these renderers, so you will be able to disable this option if you wish. We will also make it an option you can change from the job properties after the job has been submitted, just in case.
Cheers,
Ryan Russell
Frantic Films Software
http://software.franticfilms.com/
(204)949-0070
Excellent news! Is this something we can implement in deadline 2.0 submit scripts or do we need to upgrade to 2.5 for the option?
We can likely release a patch for this next week, but you might have to upgrade to Deadline 2.5 to use it. There is a possiblity that it might still be compatible with 2.0 though. We’d have to do some testing to make sure of this.
Cheers,
Ryan Russell
Frantic Films Software
http://software.franticfilms.com/
(204)949-0070
We plan on installing deadline 2.5 in a few weeks, so I'll put this on the back burner until then. Thanks again guys!
Just letting you know that we have fixed this issue, and it will be included in the maintenance release which should be released in the near term.
Cheers,