Hey all. The dev team just told me that a Melscript function that we rely on is broken in the latest release of Maya. We’ve filed a bug report with Autodesk, but at this time I have to recommend not upgrading to “Update 3” until either we can work around it or that it’s fixed on the ADSK side. The function is named mayaBatchRenderProcedure() and it relies on data set during removeRenderLayerAdjustmentAndUnlock() that we use to set properties on overrides like “.imageFilePrefix”.
If you want to investigate for yourself, the function can be found on line 554 of the mayaBatchRenderProcedure. It may be possible to patch your local install, but I’m not sure if we’re going to go that route yet.
We actually need to render a job, how easy would be for you guys to do a simple patch that we could then delete when Autodesk comes up with a fix? Because I’m sure that will take some time…
I asked that last week, and it might be substantial. We’d also need to edit Maya’s code here, not what’s within Deadline. I don’t really feel comfortable changing another company’s app because an Update might go very badly.
One workaround should be to disable batch mode. The command line flags should work the same as always, but not all features of the submitter are going to work in that case.
We can confirm that this Maya bug has now been accepted internally by Autodesk Maya team. No further information at this time.
For any Deadline customers that wish to report the root issue directly with Autodesk, here is the information you should provide. Please also reach out to your local Autodesk reseller for support as well.
Starting in Maya 2017 Update 3, the function mayaBatchRenderProcedure no longer works if you have called removeRenderLayerAdjustmentAndUnlock on any non-numeric attribute.
In the case of Deadline (our render management software) we are are calling removeRenderLayerAdjustmentAndUnlock on .imageFilePrefix which will always have a string attribute.
The cause of this appears to be that when overriding the overrides, the values are not being checked for type so the string value is not being wrapped in quotes.
This appears to be on line 554 of the mayaBatchRenderProcedure found in Update 3.
We confirmed that this is an issue for PR74 and PR76
Steps to Reproduce
Open any saved scene file
run the mel command removeRenderLayerAdjustmentAndUnlock .imageFilePrefix;
run the mel command mayaBatchRenderProcedure(0, “”, “”, “mayaSoftware”, “” );
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I applied this patch to all my render machines 6 days ago, and they were all working. Then they stopped working in the past couple of days as I was trying to fix some other issues. After many hours of digging through log files, etc., on a hunch, I checked my batchrenderprocedure.mel files, and THEY HAD REVERTED BACK to the old versions somehow on 3 of my machines!
