Deadline check MXI Sample Level

Deadline
1

Is there a way to let deadline check the Sample Level of the maxwell render MXI file before starting the accual calculations of the frame?

The practical example.

You have rendered 100 frames based on time and not sample level, because you need to get out some samples in a serten time. Your slave force have different hardware and some mxi files reaches sample level 15 and others just reaches sample level 10. SL 15 looks good and tahts what you wanna go for.
You then set a override value to 15 on the SL and unlimited time and resubmit. It now resumes the task and tries to render all the MXI’s up to a SL of 15. But the scene it is rendering contains lot of geometry and displacement maps. Taking almost 5min before it actually starts rendering and when it does, all the frames that is already 15 will just shut down saying, that the SL target is already reached. And there is the problem, why waist the time precalculating the displacement and geo when the MXI is already SL15.

So, again. Is there a known way to force deadline to check that info before starting the actual calculations?

Cheers.

2

Deadline uses Maxwell’s command line renderer to do the rendering, so if there is a way to pull the SL from the MXI file via the command line, Deadline should be able to do this before starting the render and skip the render entirely if necessary.

Do you know if there is a way to pull the SL of an MXI file from the command line?

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

Sounds strange if it ain’t a way to check it,
but I will do some research and see what I can find out. :slight_smile:

4

You can use pymaxwell and get all kinds of info from an mxi, including the sample level. Here’s a snip of what I use to get the existing rendering time for a resumed render within the Maxwell.py plugin:

mxi = CmaxwellMxi()
        if not mxi.read(str(mxiFile),True).failed():
	        t=mxi.getRenderTimeInSeconds() / 60
	        renderTime = renderTime - t
	        LogInfo( "Subtracting " + str(t) + " minutes because of previous renders")

On windows you have to switch the plugin to using python.net in order to load the pymaxwell module, which also means changing over some of the event handlers. Seems to work fine on Linux too.

I don’t have a link on hand, but there’s more information on the next limit site about using pymaxwell, it looks like it could have a lot of possibilities

5

So maxwell understands python? or is pyMaxwell just a limited form of it?
Looks really promising tho. Doing some checks before starting the heavy grinding is cruisal, when it comes to trying to save time.

Thanks a lot egmehl!

6

I haven’t gone into detail with it either, but Next Limit describes it as a python binding for their sdk, so it looks like you can do just about anything that a 3d package could do with an mxs / mxi file.

7

Sounds like Next Limit have added an excellent new feature at last!
Deadline could really go to work on the MXI file and maybe pull out all kinds of settings…
+1 for a Deadline/pyMaxwell bridge :slight_smile: