We run a mixed farm with both Macs and PCs running Deadline Slave. Maya is installed on every machine, and Deadline currently renders fine with it on both platforms.
As for CINEMA 4D, if an absolute path is set for the Save dialog in Render Settings, Windows slaves are unable to save to the specified output path. Mac slaves however appear to save frames correctly.
Inversely, if a relative path is set in the project file, Windows slaves are able to save to the output path correctly, but Mac slaves are not. (It appears as though CINEMA 4D R12 for Mac doesn’t like relative paths in general.)
An example of our relative path Render Settings:
Relative path errors out on Mac slaves:
So, my question is, is there a way to have the absolute path for the save dialog in CINEMA (we’re using an NFS mount, so it’s /oscar2/ROYALE_SERVER/project_folder/xxx in OS X – the equivalent string for windows is Z:/project_folder/xx) be properly converted for both Mac as well as PC platforms?
Deadline Version: 5.0.0.44500
Mac OS X 10.6.7
Windows 7 SP1
CINEMA 4D R12.043 (Mac)
CINEMA 4D R12.021 (Windows)
Thanks for your message! We’ve set paths in the repo, or at least we think we have? Perhaps we’re missing one? Again, Maya seems to work cross-platform, but CINEMA is still giving us issues.
Unfortunately, the Path Mappings only affect the output path when submitting jobs from the Deadline Monitor. This is because you can specify a custom output path on submission. When submitting from within C4D, Deadline just leaves the output path in the scene settings untouched, and doesn’t overwrite them when it comes to render time.
That’s surprising that relative output paths don’t work in a cross platform environment, as we had just figured that was the proper way to handle this situation. Maybe what we should do is add the output path options to the integrated submitter, and then try to populate them with the paths from the scene settings by default. In this case, Deadline would be passing the output path to C4D via the command line, and can therefore use Path Mappings to swap the paths based on the OS.
Hey Ryan, integrating the file output into the submission script sounds like a good idea. Is there any chance we’ll see that soon? In the meantime, most of our farm is PC-based, so it doesn’t affect us a whole lot, but we’d gain about 20-30% in performance if it worked cross-platform.
I agree with your idea. On 11.5 we did something similar (of course struggling with COFFEE but Maxon helped me out with that).
Came up with a few creative options but this seems to be the cleanest.
Seems odd that relative paths DON’T work in C4D on OSX. Maybe it’s something we should talk to Maxon about then align our solution with any potential workarounds they offer.
DR made a good point about C4D: supports relative texture paths but not relative output.
If Maxon has a workaround for this, that’s great! Currently, we have the submitter additions targeting a 5.1 release, so even if there isn’t a workaround, the update on Deadline’s end isn’t too far away.
I just talked to Maxon, they said that unfortunately this is a known limitation on the Mac side at the moment, and didn’t mention any workarounds or fixes planned for the future. Looking forward to 5.1 though!
