Pre-render script in Maya 2013 not working with Deadline 5.2

Deadline
1

Hello,

I made a simple pre-render script to give a stop mo effect to my animations in Maya 2013, and I have issues with Deadline 5.2 free edition. When doing a normal batch render, it works, but with Deadline, it just kills my animation, which means that the pre-render script is at least doing something and not ignored, but it does something wrong.

The script itself simply bakes down the animation every two frames and changes the keys tangent to step, for a set of chosen controllers.
I attached a test scene with the script so maybe you could try with more recent versions of Deadline (I don’t want to upgrade if this isn’t going to fix my problem).
The script has to be unzipped to maya script folder.

Thank you for your help.
pre-render_script.zip (11.1 KB)

2

Hello,

Could I ask you to send over a deadlineslave log file from the log folder that shows this happening? That would likely help is knowing what to watch out for, and what might be happening. Thanks.

3

I messed with the names in the script when quickly cleaning it to share it, so I uploaded it again in the first post. Here is the log of the first frame, there is no mention of the script in there. That’s why I don’t know what’s going wrong.

Thank you for taking the time to help me.
Chafouin-pc_00000_20140311222546.logReport (58.2 KB)

4

Yup. nothing in there indicating what is happening. Can you click the help menu, then explore log folder, and send over the last 2-3 deadlineslave log files? If you need to send them securely, feel free to email support@thinkboxsoftware.com. Thanks.

5

Thanks for pointing me to these logs, I didn’t know about them. They don’t seem to say much either, however.
deadlineslave_Chafouin-pc(Chafouin-pc)-2014-03-08-0000.log (1.36 MB)
deadlineslave_Chafouin-pc(Chafouin-pc)-2014-03-12-0000.log (352 KB)

6

Hello,

Can I have you run this from inside a GUI of Maya, and verify if the script is putting any output to the console in Maya? That seems to be the indicator of whether the results should be output to the log file, which they clearly are not. Thanks.

7

I tried a batch render in maya with detailed verbose, and the log doesn’t mention anything about the pre-render script either. But it does work as intended.
Rendering a frame in Maya with Echo All Commands shows that the pre-render script is properly used, and doesn’t return any error.
I use the Submit Job to Deadline script for Maya, is there something else I could try to render it, maybe a a direct command line to Deadline?

Or do you think the latest version of Deadline could fix it? I sent a request to Thinkbox sales to download it.

Thanks again!

8

Hello,

I would say that an upgrade to 6.1 can’t hurt, honestly. You can definitely do manual submission as outlined at thinkboxsoftware.com/deadlin … ubmission/ but I don’t see that having any different result. You can definitely try that before an upgrade and see if that changes things. You can also run the job from the command line, all you need to do is run the job with mayabatch turned off, then the executable and arguments lines combined make the command you would use. Hope this helps.

Cheers,

9

I updated to 6.1 and still had the same issue. I rewrote the script in MEL to be sure it wasn’t an interpretation error, but that didn’t work either.

However I managed to make the script work by removing it from the Pre Render MEL and adding it in the Startup Script slot, in the Submit Job to Deadline window. Only the mel version of the script works though… Anyway, that will do the trick for me. I attach the mel script in case you’d like to try to debug that further.

Thanks for the support!
bakeStopMo.zip (344 Bytes)

10

Hello,

Thanks for including the script so we can take a look, and it’s good to know that you found a way to make it work right.