Jigsaw Rendering Not Working in Houdini and Maya Submitters

Deadline
1

Deadline Version: 10.4.10

Maya Version: 2023

Houdini Version: 19.5.805

Description:

We’re experiencing an issue where Jigsaw rendering does not function correctly within the Deadline submitter for both Maya and Houdini.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Open the Deadline submitter within either Maya or Houdini.

  2. Navigate to the ‘Region Rendering’ section.

  3. Enable Jigsaw rendering and open the Jigsaw panel.

Issue:

Instead of a functioning preview, the Jigsaw panel displays a blank viewport. After some time, the application becomes unresponsive, eventually prompting a force quit. No error messages or logs are shown to indicate the cause of the failure.

We have tested this on multiple machines to rule out GPU or hardware-specific issues, but the problem persists consistently.

Additional Notes:

• Standard tile rendering works without issue.

• Due to the lack of documentation or error output, it’s unclear whether this is a usage issue or a bug. Any clarification or guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks,

2

Did this previously work for you?

I reported this as a bug in 2019 (#755231) but there was no eta on the fix. This was Centos 7, can’t remember if the problem was the same on Windows.

There were also issues doing exports with ‘standard tile’ jobs

3

That’s a real shame it’s been around since 2019 — I hadn’t come across the issue until now, but we’re currently on Rocky 9 and I’ve just hit it for the first time. We haven’t had much need for Jigsaw tiling until recently, but with heavier jobs it’s suddenly become much more relevant — and it definitely looks like it’d be a really useful feature to have working properly.

One of my colleagues used Jigsaw a few years ago (2020?) at another studio with 3ds Max and it was working fine back then, but that was on Windows, so I’m not sure if this is a cross-platform issue or something more specific to Linux.

Any chance we can see the ticket that you raised? to maybe get a better understanding?

4

i’ll trim out the uninformative bits…

I can reproduce the black jigsaw window when using a Mantra ROP, and I can confirm that it does work on Windows, so this may indeed be something linux-related. I will pass this on to our dev team for further analysis.
…
After speaking to our dev team, I found that our Houdini Jigsaw implementation currently only supports the Mantra renderer (and possibly others that have a “camera” parameter). We are tracking an internal development issue to revisit this, but it would likely require some significant changes.

I have also submitted an internal developer issue to look further into the black screen and hanging issue for Mantra ROPs on Linux since I was able to reproduce it. I can’t provide status and timeline updates, but it is submitted and tracked now.
…
his is bug when launching Jigsaw in the Houdini submitter on linux (or at least CentOS) brings up an unresponsive black screen.

I will push this issue to the development team. But unfortunately we do not have an ETA on this.

I think it was initially developed on 3ds which is why it works great there, and everything else is a simplified implementation

1 Like
5

Thank you!

A bit of a shame that it hasn’t worked for a while now. We have tested out ‘standard tile’ on some of our Houdini and Maya jobs and that seems to be working currently, so it looks like we will have to stick that now.

Thank you again for the response!