Houdini renders loading IFD files

Deadline
1

Hi,

We’re rendering with houdini now on our network. And it’s one big trouble.
Apparently, houdini reads IFD and deadline needs to copy this local. As we have a lot of IFD files, our network traffic is going down (100 machines are reading and copying IFD files all the time).

So, the first idea was to compress the IFD files before sending them to houdini on the slaves. It was promising because apparently it would be possible for mantra to uncompress those .gz files on the fly. But that’s not working.

So… we’re working on a workaround. The compression of IFD files to gzip files is already working for us. We would just like to change the plugin of mantra in deadline. In such a way that we can pipe output from other commands to mantra.

We’re looking for a parameterlist which will look something like this:
gzip -dc file.ifd.gz | mantra -optionlist

Or are there any other ideas, in which we can lower our network traffic?

Thanks,
Lieven

2

Hi Lieven,

Deadline doesn’t copy the IFD file locally, but because mantra is reading the IFD file over the network, that can still have an impact on the network.

You would have to modify the mantra plugin to do custom stuff like this, or maybe create a brand new plugin. Our plugins do support piping stdin to a process, so that might be the way to go. The Nuke and MayaBatch plugins for Deadline use the WriteStdinToMonitoredManagedProcess function to do this.

Cheers,

  • Ryan