Fstorm Support in Thinkbox Deadline

#1

Hi everyone.
We’ve recently started using Fstorm for rendering animation sequences, and we were wondering whether we could use Deadline with it. This renderer is pretty fast, and it’s getting continuously polished for production work, and we are using it more and more on simple jobs, and we’d be super happy to see it supported by Thinkbox Deadline.
Is there any plans for this? We’d totally upgrade to this renderer and buy a couple of licences from you to enhance our GPU farm.
Looking forward to hear from you, kind regards!

#2

Since FStormRender is an integrated 3dsMax renderer, it should work in general terms without us adding anything special to Deadline to support it. The only thing missing would be the capturing of FStorm-specific parameters by the integrated 3dsMax submitter (SMTD) for adjusting them after a Job submission from inside the Deadline Monitor.

Have you tried using FStorm with 3dsMax in Deadline, and if yes, what problems did you encounter?

#3

So I installed FStorm. Then I added support for all its render properties (except for the interactive ones which make no sense on Deadline), and rendered a test. I hit an issue where the active viewport would render black unless an explicit camera was assigned, so that seems to be a bug (we had similar issues with other renderers in the past). But once I created a Physical camera, both the Beauty RGB and any FStorm RenderElements rendered correctly on Deadline.

I will polish my changes to the various scripts and param files, and will see if I can get them included in a future Deadline point release. I will log the Camera issue separately, as it is likely something that happens at C++ level in our integration plugin…

#4

Tested with FStormCamera, it rendered black too. Switched to the PhysicalCamera through the job properties, the job rendered. So there are some issues with the native camera when rendering through Deadline. I tested 3dsmaxcmd (which is more or less Backburner network rendering), and it rendered correctly. So there is definitely some issue to look into…