Noticed deadline still gets confused by maya’s image output format, especially when using its format. Morso when using this in combination with render buffers/passes with mentalray. Admittedly I find this confusing too!
It’d be great if the submission script could query maya for all constructed output paths, so that browsing for images within the deadline monitor does the right thing.
Which version of Deadline are you running? We believe that this issue was fixed with the latest release (3.0.33353), and it seems to be working fine with our internal working version. Our submission script is using the same functions to figure out the output path that the Maya render options dialog uses to display the File Names. Can you perhaps provide a specific example that isn’t working, so we could test it out here?
Thanks!
Sure; we tend to use / so each scene gets its own subfolder of renders. Deadline doesn’t recognize this.
Further, if we leave everything else in its defaults and use render-passes, maya will create a structure like
Reflection//Scene.#.tif
Diffuse//.#.tif
Deadline also has a problem with this. Just checked what version we’re running, its 3.0.33353.
Cheers,
-matt
Just tested this out. I created a scene called 2009test.mb, and my image folder was set to ‘C:\Documents and Settings\rrussell\My Documents\maya\projects\default\images’.
The scene had two layers: layer1 and layer2. For layer1, the filename prefix was simply ‘layer_1’. For layer2, the filename prefix was ‘/’.
For layer1, Deadline rendered out to C:\Documents and Settings\rrussell\My Documents\maya\projects\default\images\layer1\layer_1.#.tga, which according to the Maya Render Settings, is the correct location. For layer2, Deadline rendered out to C:\Documents and Settings\rrussell\My Documents\maya\projects\default\images\layer2\2009test\2009test.#.tga, which again according to the Maya Render Settings is correct. I was also able to view these output files from the Monitor without any problem.
I tested submitting separate jobs for each layer, and submitting a single job that rendered all layers, and both worked. In the case of submitting a single job that renders all layers, viewing the output from the Monitor is a little different. Exploring output from the job right-click menu takes you to the root output folder, and there isn’t the option to explore individual files from the task right-click menu. This is by design, since the single job is unaware of where each layer is saving its rendered images.
Cheers,
ah ok, we’re doing one job for all layers. the next job I submit I’ll let deadline split it into seperate jobs for each layer,see if that fixes things.
if deadline is able to detect the correct outputs for one-job-per-layer, surely it could run the same check for one-job-many-layers? I’d hate to see our job monitor becoming a huge list of passes. Unless you give us a way to expand/collapse related jobs… hmm…
Now that I think about it, this should be possible. We can specify multiple output paths for the same job, so we should be able to do that for each layer. Currently, there is a self-imposed limit of 6 output file names per job (this has been sort of a legacy thing), but I imagine we can either increase this number or remove the limit entirely. We’ll put this on the todo list.
Cheers,
By removing this limit, I guess in 3dsMax, we would be able to see all the output paths from say, render elements and also batch render output directories if set in a scene?
This would be a ‘nice to have feature’ 
Yup, this should be possible.
sweeeet. thanks!