Hey Deadline gurus, I am having a bit of an issue with my animation frames since my mirgration from 5 to 6 and not sure what is causing it. If anyone could shed some light on what I should do, that will be greatly appreciated!
Background - My current workflow is using Max + Vray to calculate an irradiance file for our GI pass (using multiframe incremental option) before rendering out our main passes. The way vray’s multiframe incremental works is that it computes a new GI solution map for the first frame and will only add additional GI sample to that file where they are needed. Because of this, my GI passes that were calculated every Nth frame, will progressively take less time because most samples will have been calculated at the start of the sequence.
Problem - This method works great with Deadline 5, but things start to go sideways after I upgraded to Deadline 6. I started to see big GI blotches that will plague the beginning of a shot. This leads me to study how my GI passes were being rendered out. And, I noticed each frame from the GI pass were sharing about the same render time, instead of getting shorter and shorter as I would expect. To further verify the incomplete GI solution, I compared it against a calculation done locally and found the GI calculation done through Deadline seem to have only fractions of what it should be.
My theory - I suspect deadline may have been resetting/clearing the irradiance file after teach task frames. That would explain the similar calculation time as well as the irradiance file size. Instead of getting a GI file that have information derived from the duration of a shot, I am actually getting GI information just for the last frame. I made sure to submit using SMTD 6.0 with ‘Restart 3ds Max Between Tasks’ and ‘Restart Renderer Between Frames’ unchecked, Limit only 1 machine to render concurrently. All of these settings should allow calculated GI be retained through the whole sequence and not just the last frame. But have I overlooked any specific settings?
Potential Variables - Having gone through couple projects with this problem, I have also experienced Deadline calculating my GI pass successfully under one conditions: having only one job (presumably the GI pass) at priority 100. Whenever there are multiple jobs at 100, the render slaves seem to have conflicts and will start releasing memory. Also, through the process of trying to troubleshoot this problem, I started looking into the job report logs of each irradiance pass and see if there are specific details. However, All I have been seeing is “Error occurred while writing report log: Could not find a part of the path…(System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException)”. I understand this may be associated with improper installation of Deadline 6, but could this tie to the complication that I am having now? There have been a couple times where I had attempted to replicate the problem but cannot reproduce it consistently; so, I am not sure if the network has anything to do with it.
Sorry for the long description, but I feel like I am at a lost as to what is causing the loss of irradiance map information. So if any of you have any insights or can point me in a direction for further investigation, that will be swell. Thanks again for your time and hope my explanation makes sense. Let me know if you need further clarifications.
-JC