Hi folks! Been a long time since i’ve needed support (Cause Deadline just rocks like that). But we just hired a lightwave artist and I’m trying to figure out how to configure it to work with deadline.
Right now the slaves are rendering, but they are not writing any output files.
Here’s what we did:
- Installed Lightwave 9 on slaves (minimum install option)
- Copied all lightwave plugins to a network location. Configured artist’s machine to always pull plugins from the network.
- Set up project paths on the network
- Copied LW project config files to the network
- Created a test scene (saved to network)
- Set Render globals, turned off preview/viper/etc… set rgb output path to the network.
- Submit to deadline. Set project and config paths to the network location. (Include LW file=on, use screamernet=off)
The slaves pick up the job and take about 8 seconds to render each frame. This is about how long it should take. They do not save the frames though.
Help?
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Also, I know very little about the inner workings of lightwave. Is there anything i should know about artist workflow to ensure clean net-renders? What are the config files and are they updated frequently as an artist works on a scene? Or are they just general operating parameters that rarely get altered?
(This should probably be directed to the LW forums).
–editorial
I find it strange that lightwave does not have better net-rendering support. It’s a fairly major player in the CG world, and I’d expect better from them. They even make jokes in their manual about how bad their network rendering (screamernet) is.
Hi Steven,
This is just a stab in the dark, but do you know if the slaves are able
to obtain a Lightwave license during rendering? As far as I know,
Lightwave will start up in Discovery mode (or something along those
lines) when it can’t find a valid license. One of the restrictions to
running in Discovery mode is that you can’t save renders. You can
“render” them, but no output will be saved. Try starting up Lightwave
normally on your slave machines and see if it runs in Discovery mode or not.
I know there is some ScreamerNet documentation out there somewhere that
describes how to setup Lightwave for network rendering, and I believe
Deadline has the same requirements (ie: setting up config and content
files, everything saved on the network, etc). It looks like everything
is setup right for you, but maybe the documentation might be able to help.
Cheers,
That would suck. Lightwave is supposed to have free net-rendering so they should not be trying to pull a license. I’ll go back to newtek and find out. Thanks.
The net-rendering probably is free, providing that Lightwave can find a
valid license. In other words, net-rendering won’t use up a license, but
it might require a valid license to exist. Of course, I’m sure Newtek
can provide a more concrete answer. 
Cheers,
Got it to work. You have to turn off the option to “autoscan plugins” so that lightwave does not keep changing the plugin path everytime you launch it. You also have to create a custom shortcut that tells lightwave to use the config files on the network path.
Oh and you also have to store all of your plugins in a shared network folder.
Well, thats how i got it to work anyway.