I’m in a mostly Japanese windows environment. In general Deadline runs fine, but there’s a really bad bug with render output.
If Maya’s Render.exe decides to output Japanese text, then all of the non-7-bit characters get turned into question marks before being saved. So, your log output is now undecipherable; it looks something like this:
0: STDOUT:
0: STDOUT: ?G???[: line 1:
0: STDOUT: ?G???[: line 1: (mbVtxPositions)
0: STDOUT: ?G???[: line 1: ???C???[?h???: Z:/ntbin/maya/maya2008/modules/eST2_r1847_ppi/plug-ins/eSTmeshDeformer.mll
0: STDOUT:
0: STDOUT: ?G???[: line 1:
0: STDOUT: ?G???[: line 1: (eSTmeshDeformer)
Now, I can guess that it’s having a problem loading some plug-in, but guessing is pretty much what I have to do.
This is not a display problem; it’s actually a problem with Deadline Slave itself where at some point the text is actually being forced through something which converts all the non-ASCII characters into Ascii 0x3f. Even if you are a bad person and squirrel down into the repository under DeadlineRepository\reports\jobs\999_050_000_49a68188\logs, the characters have already been turned into question marks at that point; there’s no way left I can find to recover your job output. Maya of course has supported ouptutting Japanese characters since 8.5.
I’m trying to see if there’s some way to convince Maya to output in English, but it’s really a bummer that Deadline is mangling the output on the way to the file. Anybody know a workaround for this, or is there a bug open against it?
There is a bug open for this problem. Deadline is using the default system encoding, but that doesn’t seem to handle all situations. We’ve installed the Japanese character set on one of our test machines, but that doesn’t seem to help us reproduce the problem. Unfortunately, there aren’t any known workarounds at the moment, but we are aware of the problem and are trying to get this worked out.
Thanks for the update. Interestingly, I don’t think this problem is specific to installing Japanese windows – I witnessed the problem even rendering locally on my own machine once, so it has something to do with per-user settings it looks like.
I did find a temporary workaround, which may also provide a way to reproduce the bug if you reverse it. I customized MayaCmd.py and in the PreRenderTasks I added the following call, which forced Maya to output all messages in English:
I’m suspecting that if you have Japanese language support installed in your windows, and the Japanese UI installed for Maya, you may be able to force Japanese output by setting that variable to ‘ja_JP’.
Unfortunately, the fix for this will have to wait until the next major release (Deadline 4.0). To support this character set, we would have to force Unicode encoding in many areas of Deadline, and that would break backward compatibility with previous 3.x versions. Do you know if there is an environment variable that you could set for AE (like you did for Maya)?
Actually, I was just checking on this to report that at this point Deadline is almost useless for AfterEffects for us without this fix because error output is completely garbled. We’re having continuing problems getting AE to render and every single time we have to log in to the machine and reproduce the command line with a DOS shell to see what the error message actually was.
There are no environment variables that affect AE that either I or my research assistant Mr. Google know about; I tried all the expected conventional ones like LANG as well. AE has some command line switches that affect the interactive language, but the Adobe command line parser is so weak that you can’t specify those flags along with any other operation; and they don’t appear to affect AERender.exe anyway.
I realize character encodings are a bear, but of course the problem is that you are forcing a character encoding, alas one that can’t encode the output. It will be a bummer if we have to run two separate render management systems for the sake of AE (and will certainly slow down our Deadline adoption).
It’s still unclear what actually causes AE to decide to output in Japanese. It looks like it’s an attribute of the project file, not the environment, as near as I can tell; but alas, there are no external tools to read an AE project, nor does Adobe document anything at all about this. Adobe software is just not particularly friendly to pipelines, as I’m sure you are all too well aware.
We definitely appreciate that this is an inconvenience, and it’s unfortunate that we were not able to include a fix for this in the upcoming 3.1 service pack release. I can assure you though that this issue will have a high priority for the following Deadline release.
The problem with the mangled output ended up being a lot simpler to fix that we had originally thought, so we were able to address this problem in time for the upcoming 3.1 service pack release. Our latest tests have shown that as long as the OS supports the character set, the Slave will log the output correctly and you will be able to view it from the Monitor.
and squirrel down into the repository under DeadlineRepository\reports\jobs\999_050_000_49a68188\logs, the characters have already been turned into question marks at that point; there’s no way left I can find to recover your job output. Maya of course has supported ouptutting Japanese characters since 8.5.