Hi Guys,
Running Deadline 4.0.0.40330, Maya 2011 (hotfix 2) on Win7 x64 and XP x64 slaves.
We’re currently producing a TV pilot, using renderpasses and seeing some strange behaviour.
When locally firing a batch render all frames render fine, but submitting a scene through
the Prime Focus submission script gives these kinds of errors, consistantly:
Slave Log
s/Deadline/slave/jobsData/mayaOutput_tempGT6KY0/LVA14_Lightsetup/MV/LVA14_Lightsetup.masterLayer.MV.0016.exr (frame 16)
0: STDOUT: PHEN 0.2 progr: writing image file C:/Documents and Settings/render/Local Settings/Application Data/Prime Focus/Deadline/slave/jobsData/mayaOutput_tempGT6KY0/LVA14_Lightsetup/Matte_LAVA/LVA14_Lightsetup.masterLayer.Matte_LAVA.0016.exr (frame 16)
0: STDOUT: PHEN 0.2 progr: writing image file C:/Documents and Settings/render/Local Settings/Application Data/Prime Focus/Deadline/slave/jobsData/mayaOutput_tempGT6KY0/LVA14_Lightsetup/MasterBeauty/LVA14_Lightsetup.masterLayer.MasterBeauty.0016.exr (frame 16)
0: STDOUT: RC 0.2 progr: rendering finished
0: STDOUT: RC 0.2 info : wallclock 0:00:56.11 for rendering
0: STDOUT: RC 0.2 info : allocated 498 MB, max resident 608 MB
0: STDOUT: GAPM 0.2 info : triangle count (including retessellation) : 2362090
0: STDOUT: Error: Render failed.
Mental Ray logging is set to Verbose.
Attempts to fix this: disable local rendering, don’t use mayabatch.
This job was using task size of 1, but jobs with task size of 10 frames render all 10 frames,
then after calling the last wallclock, suddenly gives the render failed as stated above.
Any ideas?
Cheers!
Dennis
Hi Dennis,
The problem is that Mental Ray is saying it failed to render after writing out the frames:
Why it would say that after successfully rendering is the real question here. 
Anyway, can you post a couple error reports, one when “Use MayaBatch” is enabled, and one with it disabled? The error messages will indicate what exactly Deadline is failing the job on, and we can go from there.
Thanks!
Looks like I’ve been dense… switching back to MayaCmd resets the “Ignore Error 211” switch.
Setting that back to ON lets the render continue and finish.
Question then becomes, why is Mayabatch failing and Cmd not?
What’s the difference between using MayaBatch and MayaCmd, and why would we switch back to Cmd
when the past 2 years we’ve been using MayaBatch with the advantage of keeping the scene in memory (if I recall correctly).
Cheers!
Dennis
Technically, both are failing, but Deadline checks error codes with MayaCmd, so we have provided a workaround to ignore the error code (211) that is known to be returned for this particular problem.
With MayaBatch, we essentially wrap our mel script code with a “catch” block that handles any errors that occur. When an error occurs, “Render failed” is printed to stdout, and the MayaBatch plugin watches for this specific error message to know when something has gone wrong. In this case, an error is still occurring, it just happens to be occurring after frames have been written out.
For MayaBatch, one workaround is to disable Strict Error Checking for the job (this option should be available in the submitter). However, this will make Deadline ignore all error messages printed to stdout, so legitimate errors could be missed. Another workaround is to modify the MayaBatch plugin to not fail when “Render Failed” is printed to stdout. To do this, go to \your\repository\plugins\MayaBatch and open MayaBatch.py in a text editor. Find this line of code:
if( errorMessage.find( "Error: Render failed" ) != -1 ):
Change it to this:
if( errorMessage.find( "Error: Render failed blah blah" ) != -1 ):
All we’re doing is changing the message it is looking for so that it ignores the actual error message. Save the file and you should be good to go.
Cheers,