We’ve been having a few random errors when doing Tile Rendering with 3dsmax and deadline…
We’ve pinned it down to our folder structure being fairly deep and then when we have render elements and tile rendering together the path + name is hitting the 256character limit of windows XP. We’re going to review our folder structure and truncate some names but the name that deadline gives to each render element folder and render element name is a bit excessively long for average use.
You can disable Deadline’s auto RE path generation. Under the Render tab, expand the 3ds Max Pathing Options rollout and disable the Update Render Elements’ Paths option.
Cheers,
Russell, this file length limit doesn’t affect any other program and 3dsmax can render to the locations, there appears to be an issue with the way Deadline renders to the local machine then copies the file back to the network directory when the path is over 256 characters.
I’ll try grab an error report next time it happens.
Dave
Hi Dave,
Good to know. We’ve logged this as a bug, and we’ll try to look into it before the next release. The error report would be great if you are able to track one down.
Thanks!
I have just been dealing with exactly the same issue here too. So +1 on the fix please.
We started looking into this today, and we’re unable to even create an output path through 3dsmax that is longer than the max length of 256 characters. The file system simply won’t let us. I think that makes this issue a limitation of the file system, and is unfortunately out of our control. That would mean that the solution would be to simply disable local rendering.
Maybe we’re missing something, in which case an error report would be very helpful.
Cheers,
This is a limitation of the Windows file system that has affected us in production several times (in the FFPreview script, for example).
See here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx#maxpath
If the file server is NOT running Windows though, writing directly to it would solve the issue, but make the saving vulnerable to network hickups.
So turning off local saving would probably solve the issue if saving to a file server with another OS, but I don’t see how Deadline could deal with it except for saving the temp data in a shorter location.
The solution we used in FFPreview was to use “C:\temp” instead of the user’s temp folder “C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Temp” or even worse, the User’s Deadline temp folder “C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Thinkbox\Deadline\temp” which eats 55 characters already (over 1/5 of the allowed path!). But this is against the Vista/Windows7 rules. It could probably be an option to specify where to store temp. frames before saving them to the network?
I tried to create a very long path using MAXScript and the “\?\D:\very long path” signature mentioned in the article, and caused Max to crash. Can Deadline use that mechanism?