I’m setting up a small network for rendering Maya scenes and am currently unable to get my Mac Pro server, which hosts my Maya Projects, to join in as a Slave. I submit a few Jobs and this Mac never picks them up. I have tried filtering the Tasks and the Mac is still available. I wondered if it is path related.
I have a Mac Pro (named Fileserver) which has a shared folder named ‘Projects’ on a disc named ‘Data’, and my Maya Projects reside in there. I have installed a Deadline Slave on this Mac.
I have another Mac Pro (named RenderServer) which is dedicated to rendering and the DeadlineRepository is shared from here. This Mac Pro also has a Deadline Slave.
From my MacBook I open a Maya scene, from FileServer, and submit a job. The path to the scene will be: '/Volumes/Projects/Maya… This is fine for the RenderServer which also mounts the ‘Projects’ share. However the path to the scene for the FileServer will be different: /Volumes/Data/Projects/Maya…
Do I have to share at root level on my FileServer so the paths will all match?
It sounds like a permission issue is preventing the Mac Pro server slave from finding the jobs. Are there any error messages in the log box in the Slave UI that indicate there are problems?
Regarding the Maya project path, you should make is so that the paths are the same from all Macs.
I’m getting a ‘file not found’ error. The Slave seems to be happy.
I think I have to ensure that the Maya scenes are shared at root level so that the path is the same either locally or from the designer’s Mac who has mounted the root level share.
Perhaps I should move all of our Maya projects to the Render Server and share the drive at root level. I don’t want to share the FileServer drive at root level because I want to control access to different shared folders. The Render Server however will only have the Maya projects and the DeadlineRepository.
As I suspected, and you correctly pointed out, I had to ensure that the path to the Maya project was the same for every Mac. To do this I shared the root of the RenderServer Mac Pro and in this share I placed the DeadlineRepository and a Maya folder containing all of the Maya project folders. Now the path to the Maya projects is the same for the RenderServer as it is for any Mac with the root level share mounted.
All Macs are able to render now thanks.
Just a quick question which is troubling us please. Why does Deadline append a ‘.1’ to the filename of the rendered image? This is preventing tiled images to be recompiled because it is looking for a file named, for example, ‘object_01.tga’ and can’t find it because the tiled image is actually named ‘object_01.1.tga’.
I was able to reproduce your problem. It looks like our Maya tile rendering isn’t handling the “single frame” animation option properly. I’ve logged this as a bug.
In the meantime, you can work around the problem by setting the animation option to “name.#.ext”, and then set the start and end frames to the same frame. Deadline will still pad the one frame, but at least the tile assembler will find the tiles, and then you can just remove the padding afterwards.
Thanks for your prompt reply. We had just figured out that by including the frame number in the Render Globals the problem would be solved. Just at that moment your reply pinged in!