legacy frame to render - Tile Render - SMTD - BUG?

Deadline
1

Hi,
Maybe it’s just me, but in render scene dialog in 3dsMax, select “Time Output” to be “Frames: 9” as an individual frame to render.
Then in SMTD, enable Tile Rendering and move the 3dsMax scrub bar to say, frame 5.
Submit Tile rendering single frame job to Deadline via SMTD, expecting frame “9”. Instead you get frame 5!
BUG?
Mike

2

Hey Mike,

When doing a single frame job with tile rendering, we always pull the frame from “currentTime.frame”. We don’t look at what the Time Output option is set to. So this is by design.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

OK.
I’m pretty sure one or two of the artists have been caught by this before.
I wonder if this is the best vs. the easiest way to handle this situation as from the artist point of view, SMTD isn’t behaving the way it ‘should’ in their eyes…

4

Ask them - what would they expect to be rendered if the Time settings were not set to Current Frame or a Pickup frames list? What if it was set to current time segment or custom time segment? Or what if the Pickup list had 2 frames listed, and the second one was a lower value than the first? Should we take the second one, or the first one? If two of the four time modes make no sense, and a third is ambiguous, why should we support them all? We could of course take the first frame of whatever is set in the Time configuration, but that would be quite unpredictable.

I guess we need some warning or tooltip somewhere? Or better documentation that nobody reads anyway? :wink:

5

Agreed. I appreciate the complexity and ambiguity of not knowing which frame number might be the correct choice when dealing with a frame range, etc.
How about a pop-up warning for the artist? (Continue - Yes/No type of warning) At least then, they don’t waste valuable time submitting a job with the wrong frame, which in turn, wastes valuable render farm time.

6

The UI says “Single Tile Job Settings (Renders The Current Frame Only)”.
I could try to add a time callback that shows the current frame in the UI as you move the time slider, so it would read “Single Tile Job Settings (Render Frame 42 Only)”. But I am not sure people will actually read that.

I dislike using popups for this purpose, but I might have to bite the bullet. We did the same for partitioning in Krakatoa, so it won’t be the first time…

7

Display time callback text in RED or how about a sanity check?
(I don’t particularly like pop-ups either)

8

Cannot use color in MXS UIs.
How would a Sanity Check work? Tell the user his time settings are not single frame and the current frame will be rendered instead? You could do that in a private sanity check for your own users right now :slight_smile:
Also, does anyone use Sanity Checks? I know I don’t.

9

Here are the necessary functions for a Private Sanity Check:

Add to the SMTD_Private_SanityCheckFunctions struct, remember to add a comma after the previous function:

	fn CheckSingleFrameTileTime =
	(
		renderSceneDialog.close()
		if SMTDSettings.TilesRendering and SMTDSettings.SingleTileJob then 
			rendTimeType == 1
		else true
	)

Add to the SMTD_Private_RepairFunctions struct, add comma before it:

	fn fixSingleFrameTileTime =
	(
		renderSceneDialog.close()
		rendTimeType = 1
		::SMTD_SanityCheck_errorReportRollout.log_action "Fixed" (color 0 155 0) true "Time Settings changed to Current Frame."
	)

Add to the SMTD_Private_SanityChecksToPerform array, remember to add a comma after the previous entry:

#(SMTD_Private_SanityCheckFunctions.CheckSingleFrameTileTime, #fix, "Single Frame Tile Rendering Requested, but Time Settings not set to Current Frame!", SMTD_Private_RepairFunctions.fixSingleFrameTileTime, true)

Hope this helps!

10

Thanks!