We’re still using DL 7 (7.2.1) here as the production version. I’ve also installed DL 8 (v8.0.4.1 at the moment) on our renderfarm parallel to the DL7 installation to test if all our scripts and submissions work fine.
Now I found a problem with our 3DS Max 2015 submissions. If I submit to DL 7 with your integrated submitter, all works as expected and Vray is rendering just fine to the network folder that is selected as the output destination in the Vray settings.
If I submit the same Max script to the DL 8 farm with the DL 8 submitter, all seems to be fine as well. The monitor shows the tasks as “completed” without any error. Problem is: the target folder is empty! All the render machines (Win 7) render their result to their local C: volume (folder example: C:\Users\admin\AppData\Local\Thinkbox\Deadline8\slave\vfxmucrender016\jobsData\57b2bea31fbda918d4bd23fe\VRayLocalOutput_tempZRT5f0).
What has changed between DL 7 and 8 that avoids DL 8 to render (or just copy after rendering?) to the defined network folder, which works fine if I render with DL 7 client and the same installed 3DS Max on the same render machine?
In D8 we now handle correctly the updating of the VFB raw/split filename between regions (frames as they are dequeued) during tile/region rendering, which we didn’t support in D7. These files are saved into a temp directory called: “VRayLocalOutput”, so you will need up update your script to pull from this location if you are running a custom script job. All the code for this can be seen in the 3dsmax.py file, together with the variable: “self.VrayLocalRenderFolder” which is used to control where the files are copied back to after “self.PollUntilComplete” exits.
Can you provide the full slave log from D7 and D8 so we can compare if the above doesn’t help?
As a side note, I would also upgrade to 8.0.7.3, as this is 3 x public versions newer (3 x service packs newer).
Thanks for your answers. I’ve investigated some more and tried your default sanity check. One error that was shown was the one that our fileout name contains two dots, like this:
This syntax works fine for us and all our setups are set like that. If I use the two dots, DL 8 will only render the files to the local drive, not the set network path. If I remove the second dot (…\987_123_lgt_v001_as.exr), DL 8 renders fine as expected.
Of course we could try to adapt to the version with only 1 dot, but all our existing setups are set like that. Is there any good reason why you changed the way you treat the Vray output file path, so it doesn’t accept the two dots anymore? Seems not to be good to have a setup render fine in DL 7 but not in DL 8 with the exact same setup.
Right, this is quite a story but I’ll try and be concise. V-Ray has always had it’s own way of doing things, re: VFB, raw and split channels. We added much code to handle all the different code paths in SMTD code to support the many different job types/workflow that are possible via SMTD. V-Ray added it’s own VFB “add Dot” option, but only to RAW and not Split. (I believe Vlado is considering this currently). V-Ray RE’s when saved via split, add their own “.” anyway as a separator. Nobody has control over that. However, many studios use multiple renderers in 3dsMax, or sometimes don’t save out via VFB or use one of many code paths in SMTD to support StateSet file naming, StateSet RE naming, tile rendering - stills/animation, region rendering - stills/animation, Jigsaw rendering, RTT, etc. Each job workflow needs certain file naming convention to be applied, such as submitting different “StateSets” will need different RE filenames, otherwise rendered images will be overwritten per state set.
Essentially, studios requested a consistent file naming mechanism, which works for all cases and also can work alongside or override the V-Ray renderer only “add dot” mechanism. Hence, in D7.2 and later, multiple tweaks to D8 to deliver the “delimiter” setting in SMTD, where studios can define a character to be used as the global pipeline delimiter. Typically, this is “" and our default is set to "”. You could change this to “.” if you so wish.
Why do 3ds Max jobs add a period delimiter to the output filename?
Deadline 7 introduced a new Delimiter option in the integrated 3ds Max submitter (SMTD) to avoid some problems with the way render elements and other auto-generated names were formatted in previous version. The Delimiter option is set to a factory default of ”.” as this is the typical convention in VFX pipelines, but it can be overridden via the Defaults INI file in the Repository. Since this setting is considered a company-wide pipeline value and should not be overridden by individual users, it is currently not exposed in the SMTD UI.
Here is our 3dsmax docs snippet on the topic:
We also have several SMTD sanity checks to check the various issues regarding “.” as per here in our 3dsmax docs or attached PDF: 3ds Max — Deadline 8.0.7.pdf (56.1 KB)
Finally, we have a tutorial on how sticky/default settings can be set globally for your pipeline. All this is openly written in maxscript and available as structs if you wish to utilise it in any custom studio submitter code: thinkboxsoftware.com/managin … itter-def/
