It seems that by default, any Deadline renders will ignore the \Plugins folder when executing jobs. I first ran into this when using RPManager, as it requires certain plugins to be loaded in order to correctly restore passes, but unless I explicitly add “C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2009\Plugins” to the plugin.ini file, the plugins are ignored.
I then tested it using a standard Deadline submission that used the BerconMaps plugin, and the render proceeds, simply replacing the material referencing that map with a standard gray material on the machines where the map location is not explicitly specified. Basically, the contents of the plugins folder is being ignored entirely.
Is this expected behavior, and is there a flag somewhere to make Max load the contents of that folder by default when running under Deadline? Or does it need to be done manually? I think the reason I didn’t run into this on our last farm iteration is someone had installed the plugins to the stdplugs folder, but I’m trying to keep the user-added ones separate this time. I would like to avoid having to manually copy the plugin.ini file across all our render nodes…
If it makes a difference, the max install was performed under a certain user account, and the Deadline launcher service and slave are running under the same user account with auto-logon rights.