After a little trouble getting the system working smoothly I’m now really impressed with the workflow for rendering animations from Maya/Vray through deadline. The system is far superior of that I had been using before with Mental-Ray and Deadline 5 with the cumbersome exporting of MI’s and manual queuing of renders.
There area couple of things that I feel could improve the submitter. The data that is entered automatically is cool, such as the job name, project and render directories. I think you could do this with other entries, the camera for exapmle is a strange one, why isn’t that taken from the render globals? Another thing I would personally like is to automatically create a temporary folder in the maya project for the .vrscene exports and give the files themselves the same name as the job.
I like the tile render option but for some of my high res render jobs there is always an area of the image which is more labour intensive than others. A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link, in the same way, these renders are only as fast as the slowest tile. Do you think there will be a way of queuing DBR renders in the future as opposed to the tile system?
I’ll keep you updated on any other things that pop up.
Glad to hear that things are running more smoothly for you! Also, thanks for the suggestions. I’ve included my comments on them below.
The camera option in the submitter is meant to be an override. When left blank, the current camera in the scene will be used automatically. It’s the equivalent to rendering with Maya from the command line without passing the -cam argument - Maya will just default to the current camera in the scene. Maybe we just need to make that more clear in the submitter, since you’re not the first person to bring this up.
I guess our concern here is that this is specific to your current workflow. Typically, we try to keep our submitters as generic as possible. Maybe you could whip up a Maya sanity check script that auto-creates the folder and auto-sets the vray output path? thinkboxsoftware.com/deadlin … nity_Check
VRay DBR support has actually been added in Deadline 6.1. Check out the CHM/PDF docs that you can download, and in the VRay Distributed Rendering section: viewtopic.php?f=85&t=11220
I’ve been using the Vray spawner submitter to take up slots on the render farm so I’m able to run renders distributed from my local machine without having to initiate Vray Standalone manually. I’ve set up specific pools for grouping machines so that I know which machines should be in use and adjusting the distributed machines in the render globals accordingly. It all works manually which is cool.
Then I installed the VrayDBR plugin that does the same thing from maya but also automatically assigns the correct nodes from the selected pool into the render globals which is also cool.
So far I haven’t found a way of submitting a DBR render through deadline, at the moment I have to run the render from my local machine. Is a DBR Vray submitter for Deadline already available in the beta or is this not something you’re looking into.
This is how the VRay DBR integration was designed to work because it’s meant to be interactive. It sounds like you want to offload the entire process to the Deadline farm, which the VRay DBR system in Deadline wasn’t designed to support.
In 6.1, we added a really useful feature to 3dsmax called “Jigsaw” (aka: multiregion rendering) that gives you more control over how the image is split up. For example, you could start with an X by Y grid, and then subdivide tiles or combine other tiles. After the tiles are rendered, Draft is then used to assemble the final image. Unfortunately, Jigsaw isn’t available for Maya yet, but it’s something we definitely want to look at supporting.
Yeah that is exactly what I’m looking for, it’s a shame that it’s not on the cards yet. The tile renderer is pretty inefficient, I’m always left with a tile that takes twice as long as the others but this was to be expected. This Jigsaw feature sounds like a good option, just a little ahead of it’s time for Autodesk to add to Maya as is the usual way.
Do you think that a standalone DBR submitter would be possible?
JigSaw is covered from 08 mins 40 secs. Note, that Jigsaw has many new features which this video doesn’t cover, including animation region tracking. The latest version of Jigsaw is available in the Deadline beta release.
The tile management system you have in 3ds Max looks like a good way of splitting renders more efficiently. The car example that “bobo” uses is very relevant to the work we do not to mention the resolutions, 10k is about standard for us at the moment but it does go us to 12 or even 14 in some cases.
As soon as it’s available for Maya I’d love to give it a go.
