Artists are reporting a random selection of frames failing to render from Maya w/ MentalRay since switching to Deadline. Requeuing the task/frame it renders fine.
In the below example, one task is frames 475-484. All frames rendered fine except frame 481–smack dab in the middle of the task–which returned “can’t create file (Invalid argument)” while attempting to write the frame. Anyone seen this? The artists assure me it never used to happen before Deadline, and now rather frequently. Is there a different way that Deadline runs the maya jobs versus our previous farm manager (Enfuzion) to account for it?
0: STDOUT: PHEN 0.2 progr: writing image file //toto/toto/jobs/<filename_redacted>.0481.png (frame 481)
0: STDOUT: IMG 0.2 warn 102002: type rgba_16 not supported by png format, using default type rgba
0: STDOUT: IMG 0.2 error 101003: …<filename_redacted>.0481.png: can’t create file (Invalid argument)
0: WARNING: Deadline is ignoring error “Error: (mental ray) : <filename_redacted>.0481.png: can’t create file (Invalid argument)” because plugin setting Strict Error Checking is disabled.
0: STDOUT: Error: (mental ray) : <filename_redacted>.0481.png: can’t create file (Invalid argument)
0: STDOUT: PHEN 0.2 error 051006: cannot create file //toto/toto/jobs/<filename_redacted>.0481.png
0: STDOUT: RC 0.2 progr: rendering finished
This appears to be a known Mental Ray error, so I doubt that Deadline is the cause of it:
forum.mentalimages.com/archive/i … -8338.html
forums.3dtotal.com/archive/index … 54736.html
Are you having any known network or server issues? It sounds like mental ray is simply unable to write the output file when this error occurs.
Regardless, it would be nice for Deadline to fail the render when it happens, rather then ignoring it like it currently does. We can do this by simply not ignoring that specific mental ray error. We’ll do this for 5.2, but you can do it now by opening up the following files in a text editor (note that you probably should create a backup of them first):
\your\repository\plugins\MayaCmd\MayaCmd.py
\your\repository\plugins\MayaBatch\MayaBatch.py
Find this code in each file (it should be near the bottom in both files):
elif( errorMessage.find( "Could not read V-Ray environment variable" ) != -1 ):
ignoreError = False
Beneath it, add these two lines:
elif( ( errorMessage.find( "error 101003:" ) != -1 ) and ( errorMessage.find( "can't create file" ) != -1 ) ):
ignoreError = False
Save your files, and you should be good to go.
Cheers,
There’s no network issue that I can identify. I’ve seen a couple of reports on various forums of other people seeing the same error, again, just sporadically.
I’ll try adding it as an error and see if that helps.
Will this cause it to fail even with “strict error checking” disabled?
No. When strict error checking is disabled, the only thing that deadline relies on is the Maya exit code to determine if there was an error. We always recommend keeping strict error checking enabled, and only disabling it for special cases.
Cheers,