After installing Deadline6 and the RPM Scripts and setting RPM to use Deadline… when RPM is opened in MAX2014 and the machine that houses the repo is not running, a bunch of errors are thrown where various .ms files can not be found. Of course they can’t be found if they are being looked for on another machine that is not running and I don’t want to turn that system on at this point. There are many times where I want to open and use RPM on the workstation without net-rendering so I don’t want to turn on the repo system.
The user must click through several of these missing script messages then RPM appears. But when the user chooses to do a preview rendering from RPM, another error is thrown that the user must click through then the preview render happens as desired then another error is thrown that the user must click through to dismiss.
This issue did not occur with Deadline5. You could have RPM setup to use Deadline5 and could open and use RPM without errors being displayed when the repo system was shutdown. Of course I could go through the hassle of drilling down in the RPM preference settings to turn off the Deadline6 usage but this would be a major pain to have to do all the time.
Is there a way to have the missing scripts exist locally on the workstation system to avoid these errors and avoid having to turn off Deadline in RPM all the time?
Is there a way to have these scripts not called until the user actually chooses to do a Net Submission from within RPM or something?
Wow, I am surprised how different our mind set was when developing this
Having spent nearly 8 years in production with Deadline as the backbone, I could never ever imagine a setup where the Repository is not running.
Obviously, in a private setup that is not on 24/7 this could be the case. But I admit it never even crossed my mind (although it wasn’t my idea or decision to make this change).
What we were trying to do was ensure that the same set of files are using for both SMTD and RPM. In the past, the RPM files were a severely modified version of the SMTD files, and each time we made a change to the one we had to port it to the other.
I will discuss this with Grant, I am sure it would be possible to handle a missing Repository gracefully and simply not load the Deadline scripts if it cannot be accessed. Also, SMTD pulls local copies of the files when it opens the UI, so these files should be available on your local machine. We just have to make sure RPM knows about them and looks for the alternative location in that case. Of course, these files would not be able to do anything if the Repository is not accessible, since RPM has to ask it for Pools, Groups and a bunch of other things when opening the UI.
Thanks for the feedback, and sorry for the (temporary) inconvenience!
Thanks for the info Bobo! I think your single-user description basically nails it. I realize it may sound like a weird situation compared to multi-user studios… but as a single-user, there are many times where I am not net-rendering anything, yet I use RPM for both single-frame preview test renders while modeling/materialing/animating, etc. as well as setting up multiple passes in RPM (that will be net-rendered at a later time). The render rack (and the repo system) exist in another part of the house and I don’t like to burn the extra electricity uneccessarily. And when I do have the repo system on when I am not net-rendering, I will frequently forget that it is on cuz it’s out of sight/out of mind.
(I would love to have a small app that visually told me what systems are running elsewhere. Ideally, I would want it to simply display the machine name (in larger than normal typesize) and if it was OFF the name would be grayed out and if it was ON it would be bright glowing green! I am a visual person and still to this day love the TapeFix tool you made years ago because of it’s large readout type).
I guess if there was an easy way to start RPM in BB mode or Deadline Mode that would solve the problem too, but normally I would always be using Deadline for all net-rendering yet I do use RPM when the repo system is not running.
