Here is a list of dev notes, crawled from various forums including Chaos Group, Thinkbox forum, ADSK / CGTalk forums and my experience. I thought it useful to share to try and ensure Deadline DBR support covers as many issues as possible, which have been known to come up in the past when studios use DBR. Covering off these points should ensure Deadline DBR support is a big success!
- Possible issue with UNC paths only working in DBR. Mapped Drives fail? Rumour?
- Generally consensus is not to run DR spawner in NT service mode. Unreliable. Issues with drop of mapped drives, which makes the previous comment about UNC paths being better make more sense.
3. Disable deadline slave from running other jobs. Holding pattern.
4. Handle multiple versions of 3dsMax, multiple versions of VRay and bit build.
5. Handle killing the spawner if it becomes unresponsive. How to test for this?
6. Make Deadline Slave spawn the VRay DR spawner.exe. Check for socket response via py?
7. Clean exit on finish, reallocate slave back to normal farm job duties. - Automatically add/remove DR nodes to the active render? - feature coming in VRay v3.0
9. Off-load master workstation initiating the DR render from artist wks to a render node? Initially submit as a job to the queue. SMTD control %max_root%\plugcfg\vray_dr.cfg file. Control slave version as well if you want to build a master off-load DR setup. (if useUserProfiles=1, then vray_dr.cfg under local user profile) - “getDir #plugcfg”
You can have one of your servers controlling the DR without requiring a workstation license. If you submit the job with DR enabled to one machine, it will DR to the rest. You just need to set up the “vray_dr.cfg” file in the maxroot\plugcfg folder of the render server that’s controlling the DR with the list of render nodes you want it to use. - You can copy the file from your workstation over to the server, and edit the text file so the servers you want to use have a “1” after their name.
- Make sure when submitting a scene to bb that the “Save hosts with scene” option is disabled
- Ensure the usual 3dsmax plugin backburner has been run at least once check has been executed on DBR plugin jobs
13. Include the vray_dr.cfg file when submitting a DR job if its going to be a master off-load type job. NO NEED! If you use the newer option “Save hosts with scene” option in the 3dsMax file - Include option to enable the “VRay DR node RE” for debug purposes.
15. Ensure spawner.exe STDout is redirected to Deadline Slave log reports. Also control the verbosity level. Very useful for debug. Duplicate, below.
16. Option req to resolve vray_dr.cfg DNS computer names > IP addresses instead. - Support for DR RT as well? “getdir #plugcfg vrayrt_dr.cfg”
- Instead of defining exact machines to use for DR. It would be better if you allocate to a pool and then the first X number of machines to report back to Deadline they are available would be more slick!
- Vray creates temp.max file during DR. Might need Deadline to ensure it cleans up after processing: “maxroot\temp”
- Feature coming in V-Ray 3.0, “we implemented an option for render servers to request bitmaps directly from the client machine and cache then locally, if they can’t find them. This is already implemented in the nightly builds of V-Ray for Maya and seems to work quite well.”
- Must re-direct STDout VRay logs on each slave to Deadline as it contains important info such as missing maps file path location, etc.
- Running the latest spawner version allows older versions of 3dsMax to render ok with DBR.
- Ignore Local Machine - setting now available in 3dsMax?
- Need check that all DR nodes are running the same version of VRay for DBR to work. Deadline should print out WARN: message if this happens.
- Add Rhino VRay DBR support as well?
- Maya has option “-distibuted=2” to stop the master/local machine from taking part in DR.
- Could Deadline control the process priority of spawner.exe?
- Make sure Deadline runs a clean-up all temp vrscene/max files created at the end of each DR process. Flush it out.
29. “VRAY_ASSETS_CACHE_PATH” available to anyone else apart from SoftImage users? - Vlado has confirmed “Internally, V-Ray now supports adding and removing DR servers on the fly.” - VRay v3.0
31. XSI/Maya has “Transfer Missing Assets” function. What about 3dsMax? Duplicate, above.
32. Option to use VRay DBR Bucket Render Element - for debug in Deadline? Duplicate, above.
33. SMTD tab should be made to house these new DBR toolset? - VRay DBR spawner should always only try to spawn 1 spawner of the latest version on 1 machine at any 1 time.