I came across a service called Lucidlink ( https://www.lucidlink.com/ ) yesterday, and thought It might help us relieve some of the issues we’re having with freelancers, as they right now need a VPN to acces our files.
But as the the files in this case would’t be totally downloaded, I was wondering if it might not work together with Deadline, and in our case C4D, Houdini and Redshift.
So I wanted to hear if someone had any experience with this, before I investigate further.
Thank you.
Did you get anywhere with Lucidlink?
I’m looking at it now for file storage, but would need to get Deadline cloud to be able to access it as well for the full pipeline.
We use it on our end for our storage and using it together with Deadline rendering. Not the new deadline cloud but traditional deadline and spot instances.
There are some issues it seems depending on the application/renderer you are rendering with when rendering animations on multiple instances at the same time (possibly only occurring on aws)
There is a known workaround, to make sure you have “Enable Local Rendering” checked, which actually renders the image to the aws instances “local disk” temporarily first and then moves it into the set output project folder (that is in your lucid link storage)
Some of the Deadline plugins we were using did not have the Enable Local Rendering option so we had to custom add it to the plugin.
The lucid link team have been trying to identify the problem but are still troubleshooting it.
But there are many people using Deadline with lucid link.
Richard
Hey all.
Any advancements on this topic?
We’re also getting really weird results running deadline with lucidlink locally. It seems it’s usually a hit and miss. Sometimes the scenes are not able to be found, however they are there when browsing to that location. eg. C:/ProgramData/Thinkbox/Deadline10/workers/%hostname%/jobsData/.
I’ve tried all the knobs and can’t figure what the issue is.
Are there any resources around I can have a look at to have a robust setup going?
What do you mean though with “scenes”
“Sometimes the scenes are not able to be found, however they are there when browsing to that location. eg. C:/ProgramData/Thinkbox/Deadline10/workers/%hostname%/jobsData/.”
Deadline should be calling the scenes from the Lucid path. Not data within any local deadline folder.
Can you share some sort of video or detailed list of steps and deadline submission settings you are using?
Best,
Richard
I have a fully remote farm running using deadline and lucidlink and another on suite studios. 40+ Machines all over the states with 10+ artists accessing them.
Make sure you enable local rendering and upload scene / project files. Lucid link gets tripped up when 0KB holding files are written then overwritten with the actual file quickly.
if scene files are uploaded, deadline copies this to the programdata folder as a cache to load from, it means that any edits to the project file on lucid link aren’t picked up by deadline.
@dillucan one issue with scenes not being found might be that lucid link has not fully synced its file index/meta data by the time deadline starts.
if you run
lucid status
The “Filespace file index” message needs to read “up-to-date” before deadline should really start the job to fully have all the files accessible.
Are you making sure that is the case?
Best,
Richard
Hi there,
I’m currently trying to get my remote team up and running with deadline and we use Lucid Link for our cloud storage solution. I am running a 5 machine farm at my office, but i wanted to share that farm to other team members in remote locations.
When you say that you are using Lucid Link with Deadline rendering, are you using Lucid as a common repository? as such, how are you connecting your remote team members to your deadline render? Are you using AWS to share a remote connection server to your team members?
I apologize if any of these questions are elementary, but i’m having a hard time getting to the root of the issues that pop up in the process. Mainly getting remote team members access to the farm here on my location.
Any help you could give would be greatly appreciated!
Hi Jim,
We are not using lucid as the common repo, you could but the important thing is the client running on a server as you will need the database/connection server/license forwarder etc etc running on a system. So for them to connect to the server (ie for them to launch deadline monitor and it connect to your repo, they would need to be given connection access to wherever the client server is running either via vpn to your server or some secure whitelisting of their ip etc etc.
You could look into Zerotier https://www.zerotier.com the free version might be enough if you only have a small number of remote users (10 below). This gets them onto the same network as you and i think for the type of connections needed with deadline, it would be sufficient as you are not moving the scene files over it)
Best,
Richard
My setup was deadline on an Amazon EC2 AWS instance (about $200 a month), zerotier installed to get access to that for everyone (saves the faff of port forwarding with AWS to do remote access), then lucid on artist and rendering machines for files. This basic setup will get you rendering files.
Also look at suite as an alternative to lucid if need be.