We are having trouble overwriting existing images when rendering a Maya scene (with any renderer), and Nuke.
Maya problem
If the scene has been rendered before (so the images already exist) and the scene is changed and rendered again it will randomly fail to overwrite the files.
Deadline will not report any errors, and will say that the tasks have been completed as expected, but when you view the image sequence, random frames will still be the older version of the images, that haven’t been overwritten. It is rendering the images (ie its not just skipping the existing images) but it is failing to overwrite them. If you manually delete the entire image sequence from the server and resubmit the job to deadline it works fine, but obviously this is not ideal.
Nuke problem
We have a custom Nuke writer that creates an HD image sequence, and a stamped lowres jpeg sequence, from which we auto generate quicktimes. When we re-submit (either manually or through deadline) a Nuke job we can get an error saying “failed to rename the .tmp file - permission denied”. It is always a .jpeg file that it errors on. Again if you manually delete the offending files from the server, it will work fine.
I have put both these problems in one topic, as they seem similar in nature.
We have only recently started experiencing these problems, and we are running 5.1.0.46398 on a windows 7 64 bit network.
Any help would be great, thanks
M
Maya problem
Can you post a log from a task that shows success even though the frame wasn’t overwritten? We can check the log to see if Maya printed out any errors that Deadline may have missed. You can find the log by right-clicking on the task in the Monitor and selecting Task Reports -> View Log Reports. Deadline doesn’t explicitly control the saving of the rendered images, so hopefully Maya is printing out something useful that Deadline could watch for.
Nuke problem
I think this is actually a known Nuke problem, and isn’t specific to Deadline. Nuke 6.x’s release notes are full of references to temp files and permission issues when rendering on Windows, so it seems like they’ve been fighting this for a little while. Just like for Maya, Deadline doesn’t explicitly control the saving of the rendered images, so I don’t think there is anything Deadline can do about this. Are errors at least being generated when this problem occurs?
Cheers,
On the Nuke issue…
It’s a Windows File Server issue. The Foundry have been fighting this for years. The only confirmed solution is not to use any windows file servers to store your output footage on. If this isn’t possible, you could write a script to help you delete these temp files when the issue occurs or use the Deadline event plugins to write a py script to execute if a Nuke job fails, search for *._tmp files and delete them and re-queue the job.
Mike
Thanks for the info guys,
I will add a maya log as soon as the problem happens again.
As for Nuke - that totally sucks!
The problem seems to have gotten a whole lot worse since we started using 6.3
But at lease now i now its a windows thing - i will probably rewrite our submission script to delete any files that already exist.
that should fix it.
I’ll let you have a log as soon as i get one.
thanks again