Fairly new to Deadline. Have set up multiple c4d renderfarms in the past though.
We mainly use deadline for Nuke and Maya/Redshift. Both applications live on our server together with the repository and are not installed on every single slave machine. For Maya and Nuke this works great. For c4d however, renders are throwing a LOT of errors. Some slaves (3-4) are chewing through frames but others (most of the slaves) are crashing at either init or at random times during render.
How would I go about troubleshooting this? Is it supported to load C4D from server? Do people generally install every software on all slaves? Having a centralized deployment makes it so much easier to update versions of both host software and plugins. Could it be because of missing system dependancies since certain files are not installed locally on the slave?
Cinema central install would be a new one for me. Not sure if it’ll work or not, but you should follow the usual “Isolating Render Errors from Deadline” guide. Turning off batch mode on Cinema and running the “Full Command” from a command prompt / Terminal window is likely going to be the ultimate test there.
I agree the central install is a nice setup. The “booting a disk image” is a little better, so if you ever want to try rendering inside AWS you let me know.
If i remember correctly Cinema needs some dependencies installed on the machine its supposed to run on. I think what we did back in the days was to install every major cinema release once on each slave, and then run it from the server. Then you should be able to put minor releases directly on the server and run them without problem. Not sure if this is the case anymore though.
Tried running c4d CLI from the machines that were failing and got missing DLLs.
Also, machines randomly failed to load some of the plugins that existed in the plugins dir of the central installation. Luckily you can set the c4d plugins directory via the system variable “C4D_PLUGINS_PATH”. Even more convenient when you can set env variables along with the deadline job submission. So no need to set the variable on each machine individually.
To sum it up, plugins still live on the server but in a different directory, outside of the c4d “installation”. This path is set on each machine at the start of a job through the submission script.
