i’ve allready report this problem to the thinkbox support but it is such a weird issue that i wanted to ask if someone have experienced something similar.
It is about the szene file Deadline copies from the repository over to the local drive it just appears like not only the camera but sometimes most of the scene gets lost on the way to the renderer.
The file isn’t broken, you can open it just fine but 80% is just gone.
as i said, the error can even pop up when the scene was transfered perfectly fine and even when i tell deadline to load the scene directly from the original network path.
Right now we have, the exact same issue on a rather simple. We send it to Deadline the file is copied to the renderer from the repository, i open the file manually on the renderer and everything is ok.
But Deadline refuses to render the scene telling me this:
Let’s try to figure out what is in the Job files created at submission.
*Take the original scene with the “bad” camera and perform the usual submission.
*Execute in the MAXScript Listener
shellLaunch SMTDPaths.tempDir ""
*In the temp directory of Deadline on your workstation, locate the folder with date and time closest to now - this should be the folder with the latest submission.
*In that directory, open the file “max_job_info.job” in a text editor. (in fact, upload a copy here so we can all see it).
*Locate the line starting with Camera= - it should in theory contain the name of the camera you are having issues with.
*Also check the following lines - Camera0=, Camera1=… and see if the camera is listed there.
At this point, we just want to make sure the camera lines in the job file make sense.
Then we will have to think about what is going on at render time, since the info from this file is applied to the renderer (in this case, the renderer is told to render the camera with this name, and for some reason it claims it cannot find it in the scene).
You could also try adding a few new cameras to the scene, but still exporting with the “bad” one in the active viewport. Then in the Monitor, open the Job Properties and in the 3dsMax properties, try changing the camera to one of the new ones. See if it renders (it probably will). Then switch back to the “bad” one (if it is on the list). See if it will fail again.
Eventually, you could strip most of the geo from the scene (or just delete all geometry and make a teapot) and upload the Max file with the “bad” camera here so we can try rendering it ourselves to debug.
Thanks i’ll try it out immediately, but no garanty it will work. This is not something that only happens to this specific scene it just occurs sporadically in different files, maybe the file will render just fine now.
We will be looking at possible solutions, or at least a warning at submission time that there is an invalid character. Of course, it would be better if we could make Max render the camera even with the space in the name - MAXScript for example allows you to replace spaces with underscores and it still resolves names, but we pass our data from MAXScript through Python to C++, and somewhere in the process the space was probably trimmed (as the error message does not include it). MAXScript seems to be outputting the right data. Quite possibly the extra space was dropped during or after the name was read from the Job file.
For some strange reason, this seems to be the reaction by 3dsMax when you feed it an in-correct camera name via the SDK…[maybe / needs to be debugged by the Deadline development team further]
[just for fun / don’t do this on a production file]
I wouldn’t recommend this, but watch what happens if you type in a camera name and hit the “tab” key a couple of times and then submit the job to Deadline. Boom! Same deal. In both cases, it breaks the enum drop-down list in the post submission, so you can’t fix the camera name even if you wanted to! (This is how I originally discovered this issue)
