I can’t comment on the actual issues here other than we’ve seen a couple other cases but don’t have any solid leads on finding the root cause yet.
But I can shed some light on why Deadline didn’t catch that second error line and what could maybe be done about it.
The issue with Deadline’s error logging is as soon as it saw “Error: Caught exception: The attempted operation failed.” it sends a kill to Houdini and stops watching the output. In this case, right before catching the much more useful “Unable to initialize rendering module with given camera”.
The possibly short-sighted option would be to not recognize that first line as a render-failing error so we at least get the next line in the Job report. In a perfect world the regex that watches for stdout errors could be looking for multi-line errors before it triggers the failure.
Does Houdini commonly throw errors in this two line format? Or is this something that’s PDG specific. I ask just to flesh out a feature request with a little more context.