maya 2009 submission problem

Deadline
1

Using Maya 2009 we have a strange submission problem.

When submitting a scene ( on some machines) the submission dialog that pops up in maya has the correct settigns, but the actual renders are being send to a wrong project location with wrong frame rates, while rendering the right scene.

Any thoughts.

2

Which version of Deadline are you using? In Deadline 3.1 (the latest release), job files are now copied to the local user profile folder instead of the shared user profile folder. This fixed the problem where old job files wouldn’t get overwritten by new ones, and result in problems like you’re describing.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

Unfortunately we are using 3.0 sp1 and we can not update in a middle of the project. Is there a work around?

4

The workaround would be to enable permissions on C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Frantic Films\Deadline on each machine so that Everyone has full read/write access.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
5

That did not work. Reinstalling deadline client on that machine.

6

OK, then this might not be the problem we are thinking of. Check the render log for the frames that are saving to the wrong location, and look for the path of the output files that Maya is saving. Someone else is reporting a similar problem, and according to the render logs, Maya says it is saving to the correct location when it actually isn’t. Since Deadline is using Maya’s command line renderer (Render.exe) to do the rendering, it could be a Maya issue that is causing the output to save to the wrong location.

7

The interesting thing is that the render is fine when submitted from a different machine with the same version of maya.

8

Should it not be true then that everyone has that problem using maya 2009, and on every machine?

9

Not necessarily. It could be a configuration issue with a particular install of Maya - you even said yourself that it works when you submit from another machine. What I was implying was that if the log from Maya is saying it’s saving the output to location A, but it saves it to location B, then Maya must be doing something wrong under the hood. Did you have a chance to check the log files to see if this was the case?

Here are a couple of things to check:

  1. Are there any configuration differences between the submission machine that works and the one that doesn’t? These could be Maya differences, or something like the user that is logged in when the job is submitted.
  2. When output for a frame is saved to the wrong location, does this happen on one or two machines in particular, or is it completely random? You can check which machine rendered the frame in the Task list in the Monitor.
  3. When a machine does output the frame to the wrong location, check the log to see where Maya is saying it is saving the file to. If Maya is saying that it’s saving it to the correct location, but it actually isn’t, then something really strange is going on.

We’ve only seen two cases of this problem, and both are with Deadline 3.0. We have a feeling that using the shared user profile folder may have something to do with this, and that if related, upgrading to 3.1 would fix the problem. I understand that this isn’t a possibility in the middle of a project, but it may ultimately be the only way to get around the problem unless the checks listed above result in a potential workaround.

Cheers,

  • Ryan