We use both 3DS Max and C4D in our office and Deadline as our net rendering solution. We have a small render farm as well as each persons workstation available for net renders.
Every time a C4D job is submitted to to the render, a console window pops up after every task completes. The HUGE problem is that it completely steals focus yet it’s blank. It’s just popping up apparfently in case it’s needed.
This is causing major work slowdowns because the window is constantly stealing focus and disrupting workflow.
I know very little about C4D [I’m a Max guy], but is there a way to either stop that window from popping up all together or at very least, stop it from stealing focus? This is REALLY annoying because I might actively animating an object, suddenly the window pops up, steals focus, now I can’t let go of the object and just it’s pinned to my mouse movements, thus screwing up my animation.
I do know that increasing the task black will limit the number of times that it pops up, but it’s the stealing focus part that is the MAJOR issue.
We have also tried a script to specifically close the window as soon as it pops up, but it still steals focus in that 1/2 second that it is up.
I believe C4D pops up this window. It may be possible to suppress it, but we’ve seen cases where suppressing these types of console windows will suppress all stdout from the rendering process. That means no progress reporting, or if an error occurs, there will be no information.
If you install the Deadline Client as a service on your workstations, that should suppress everything that would popup during the rendering, while still allowing console output to be obtained. That should solve your problem.
That sounds like a solution that may work and has actually been suggested in our office. However, without trying it 1st, the issue that I see may be that you cannot easily start and stop the slave from rendering on our workstation machines. Basically, we rely on out render farm to handle renders but in crunch times, [which are more frequent than we would care to admit], we launch the slave and render in the background on our personal workstations. Will running it as a service make it harder to limit when the slave is running or not, or just goto the task manager and stop or start the service as needed?
Additionally, where might I find instructions on how to run an application as a service?
You can interact with the service from the Deadline Monitor. In the slave list, you can right-click on your slave and use the Remote Control submenu to control it. Normally, you need to be in super user mode to do this, but the restriction is removed when you’re interacting with the slave running on your own machine.
The Deadline Launcher will run as the service, but the slave will be launched via the Launcher when using the Remote Control submenu, thus allowing it to run in the background (and suppress any popup windows).