I’m testing deadline to see if I can set it up at home with my other two machines instead of the Backburner and I’ve encountered the following issue:
When using an hdr file with VRayHDRI deadline don’t copy the hdri file to the repository and it’s rendering the job without it. I’m using SMTD 4.1 to submit the job from max 2009 64bit (vray 1.5 sp4a) and under the rendering tab I tried with “Copy ALL External file ref to the rep”, also with “Copy LOCAL…” with no luck. Then I look at the job directory from the monitor I see the HDR is not there and I get black frames.
With some further testing I realized it’s not because deadline can’t read vrayhdri but because of how its used in max. I attached an example scene and if you open the asset tracker you can see the hdr in the external links list and not in the regular material/maps list. That’s because files that are used in vrayhdri are stored as external links in the scene and deadline is not copying any files from that list.
The only way I found to make it work is to apply the same hdr file as a regular bitmap loader to a temp object in the scene. This way the hdr file is in the maps list in the asset tracking and deadline copies that to the repository. This is of course not an elegant way to solve this issue and I really hope it can be fixed in the submission script.
Thanks for uploading the test scene. I am able to reproduce the problem, so I’m going to see if we can figure out a solution (if a fix is possible, I would expect it to all be done within the submission script).
Thanks for the fast reply. Looking at the “SubmitMaxToDeadline_Functions.ms” script I think I see the issue. The way deadline collects data from the scene is by getting all the subanims in the scene which includes all the objects, materials, textures etc. For each of these it checks true if the subanim has a property called ‘filename’. The VrayHDRI texture don’t use that property for an external file but it uses a different property called ‘hdrimapfile’.
I noticed this method makes the submission a bit slower on heavy scenes because of the subanim property check. Wouldn’t it perform a whole lot faster just to collect everything that’s in the asset tracker?
I added special casing to the bitmap collection code to check for the HDRIMapName property, and this allowed SMTD to collect the hdr file in your test scene. I submitted your test job, and the frames didn’t come out black, so it appears that it is working properly.
This update will be included in the upcoming Deadline 5.0 release (which is currently in beta). If you would like to join the beta program, see this announcement for more info: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4497
The plan is to include this fix (as well as the copy speed improvement) in the beta 3 release, which should be early next week.
