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