Edit Bitmap Paths after Submit?

Deadline
1

I’m pretty green with all the settings/capabilities of Deadline.

I have some render jobs where the bitmap paths were not set correctly before submitting. In BB, soon after starting the job the job name would have become red to indicate an error, I could have glanced at the error (easy to find within BB) and realized that the paths were wacked and killed the job, edited the paths and resubmitted and all would be fine. In Deadline, nothing ever turned red to indicate a problem and all showed green and it appeared that the job was rendering. But several slaves were sort of hung (and I didn’t know it for a long time) on the paths problem. And I only knew it was a path problem after visiting each problem Slave via RDP and seeing it asking for a path… nothing within Monitor (that I could find) told me it was a path problem.

Several questions:

  1. How visually am I supposed to know there’s a problem with a job or slave? Do I not have some setting set that would alert me visually about problems? A column entry showing 22 errors is nice, but how do I quickly jump to see those errors?

  2. Can you edit the bitmap paths on a job that has already been submitted?

Normally, I would just delete the job, edit the path in MAX and re-submit. But because much of the jobs had already been rendered (not exactly sure how), if I kill and re-submit now, those renders will have to be redone. Just wonder if I’m missing something.

Thanks!

2

Hmmm… OK, I found out how to view the error reports. Problem is, the report doesn’t mention the actual problem… an incorrect bitmap path. Only when I visited the Slave and saw a file dialog asking to find the missing file did I confirm what the problem was.

3

Hi Mike,

Normally, Deadline will detect popups (like the file dialog you described) unless it is explicitly configured to handle or ignore them. If this is still a problem can you send us the log from the slave at the time you RDC’ed into it? We can see what Deadline was trying to do with that dialog.

Also, are you able to send us one of the error reports? I’m just curious to see what’s in it.

Max isn’t the best application at reporting error messages. We try to pull as much info from Max’s network log to make errors as clear as possible, but sometimes it simply gives us nothing useful to report. :frowning:

Cheers,

  • Ryan
4

Thanks for the info Ryan! I don’t have those error reports anymore but will keep that in mind for the future.

So is there a way to edit the bitmap paths on a submitted job or does that have to be done in MAX and resubmitted?

Thanks again.

5

It would have to be done within Max and resubmitted.

If you happen to be submitting your scene files with your jobs, you could edit the scene file that was submitted with the job. That would save you the extra step of resubmitting. You can right-click on the job and select Explore Repository Directory to find the scene file if this is the case.

Mind you, if you’re not submitted the scene file with the job, you can just edit the scene in it’s original location on the network, and again this will save you from having to resubmit.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
6

Ryan,

Thanks for the info… good to know.