I am re-re-retrying composite out as our CG composite program. I have used deadline to network render toxik/composite jobs in the past with success. However this is the first time I’ve tried it with 2012 and the new deadline 5.1.
Here is what is going on:
I submit the render, and everything goes fine with that.
The slaves pick up the render and everything in the reports and readouts indicates everything is rendering fine.
The packet gets done , but no files were created in the designated folder and the Deadline job has no menu items for “Exploring to Output” to figure out where the render went.
The output should be saved to the application’s default output location on each individual slave or wherever the output path was defined in the scene. I’m unfamiliar with Toxik, but maybe another user has some recommendations
Was there any hint where the output could be within the output log?
yes, the scene has a defined output. it has a variable driven output destination which usually is a folder called “renders” directly below where the composition is.
I have discovered this much. If you use the tokens (i.e. <RenderFolder/..tga) to define your path the renders get sucked into the black hole. However, If you “hard code” in the file path (V:\myProject\myProjectRenders.0000.tga) the renders work fine. So it seems like deadline is having a hard time parsing through Composite’s token system.
Do you know how Composite resolves the token? Is it a path that is relative to the comp file, or is it defined to map to a specific path? The reason I ask is that Deadline doesn’t actually touch the comp’s output path at render time, so Composite is handling all that stuff internally. If is mapped to a specific path, is it possible that the slave machines don’t have that token properly mapped? I’m guessing Composite doesn’t resolve the path until render time, and if points to a different location than the one defined on the submission machine, that could explain why your renders get lost.
Also, it might help if we could take a look at the render log. Just right-click on the job in the Monitor and select Job Reports -> View Log Reports.