Problems rendering maya hair with vray and deadline

Deadline
1

I have a maya scene that has hair in it that I am attempting to render with v-ray. The scene rendered fine on my local machine however when I sent it to deadline as a Maya batch render job it would hang infinitely on the farm. I tried this with deadline 6 and deadline 5.2 but they both had the same behavior. There are no other errors on the job other than it hanging and not rendering the frame. When I deleted all the hair in the scene it would then render through the farm.

I am using Maya 2013 and vray 2.0 on windows 64 bit OS.

I ended up getting around this by exporting my scene (with hair) to vrscene files and rendering with the deadline vray command line plugin. When I rendered it this way it rendered as expected and in the same way that it was rendering on my local machine. The only downfall with this is that it took about 12 hours to export my scene to vrscene files on a single machine and I couldn’t figure out a way to distribute the vrscene generation across the farm.

has anyone else had this problem before or know what could be causing this? Thanks.

-Christian

2

Hi Christian,

One thing we can try to do is determine if the problem is Deadline-related or not. Submit the job again, but this time disable the “Use MayaBatch” option so that Deadline performs a regular command line render using Maya’s Render.exe application. If the problem still happens, you can look at the slave log to see the executable and command line arguments Deadline is using. You can then try running that same command from a command prompt on a render node to see if the problem happens outside of Deadline. If it does, then at least you can remove Deadline as a possible source.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

Thanks Ryan,

I tried sending a job without the mayabatch option but when I looked at the render log it seemed like it was still calling mayabatch. Are there some command line args that I need to put in for this as well when I send the job?

Thanks.

-Christian

4

When you don’t use the mayabatch plugin, Deadline uses Maya’s Render.exe application. The Render.exe application does a bit of prep, and then starts up mayabatch.exe to do the actual rendering. That’s why you still see mayabatch running.

Cheers,

  • Ryan