Beta 15, 3dsmax 2012 + Vray 2.4, Win 7 Pro
The progress bars for tasks are seem to be delayed. They often lag 50% or more behind the progress reported in the “Task Progress” section of the slave list. On quicker frames (3-4mins or so) they sometimes only update once or perhaps twice over the course of a task.
Are these supposed to update with the same regularity, or are they more periodic? Sometimes they seem to update every 2.5% or so, but at other times they only hop through every 25% or 50%. Is this by design, or a bug? I’d love them to update more regularly. It seems like the data is getting to the monitor, as the slave list updates regularly, but not into the task list.
Also, they occasionally display 100% after completing an earlier stage of the rendering, like light cache generation. This would be less of an issue if they updated more rapidly, as it’d be clear what was happening.
Relatedly, it would be great if the “Task Progress” bar in the job list updated based on the completion level of each task. For example, if you are using multiple frames per task, it would be great if this updated upon frame completion, rather than task completion, so you got a truer reflection of how far along the job is.
Hmm, I can’t seem to reproduce this, at least with my tests. The slave updates these task progresses every time they update their state, which is every 10 seconds or so by default. If the data in the slave list is updating regularly, the task progress should be updating at the same rate.
Can you check the slave UI to see if the progress is being updated regularly in the Progress field at the bottom of the Job Information tab?
Hi Ryan,
You are right, the progress in the slave window isn’t updating at the same speed. I’m watching a slave render right now, the Plugin Status was updating more than once a second, and the whole time it was between 50% and 75% the Progress was stuck at 50%. As soon as it hit 75%, the Progress jumped to 75%. Same from 75% -> 100%.
The monitor updated to match the slave at the next refresh.
I checked our Lightning code (this is the plugin that 3dsmax loads when rendering with Deadline). We have a callback for render progress and a callback for the render status, so it would seem that in this case, the renderer is invoking the status callback more frequently than the progress callback. Unfortunately we really don’t have control over this.
However, we actually found a bug in our Slave list in the Monitor. The task status was being set in the task progress column, and the task status column was being left blank. This will be fixed in beta 16.
Cheers,
Thanks Ryan,
So this would be a question for the guys at Chaos Group? Are they involved in the Beta at all, is it something we can discuss?
Alternatively, is it possible to get the Task Progress % to read from the render status callback, instead of the progress callback? Or is that not possible / too messy?
Thanks,
Sam
Hi Sam,
They currently don’t have direct involvement in the beta, but we are more than willing to work with them if necessary. When you render locally in 3dsmax, how does the progress update then? Do you see the same thing you see with Deadline? If we have a reproducible case outside of Deadline, then it should be easier to confirm it’s not on Deadline’s end.
Cheers,
Ryan,
Sorry for the slow response, everything got very busy all of a sudden.
When rendering locally in max with Vray, the frame progress shows up as a bar which shows progress for the current task.
In a given render for example, the bar will fill up for Light Cache generation, then fill again for each pass of the Irradiance Map generation, then again for the final render.
The progress bar is always in time with the render, sometimes there’s a lag of a second or less on very fast renders. Vray also gives an elapsed time / estimated time.
I guess that this information is all going into Task Status, and not into the progress. Ideally Deadline should be reading this from Task Status too, when Vray is the renderer. However, that could be confusing as the progress would jump from 0-100% and back again several times during a frame. You could have it disregard the progress when it’s doing the Light Cache / Irradiance Map calculations, and only start filling up upon rendering, but then jobs that are just for doing lighting precalc won’t appear to progress at all.
Perhaps the progress bars could fill up repeatedly, as described above, but the frames could be set to display as a different colour based on current type of render task (light cache, irrad map, final render). Is it easy to scan for a given text string and alter the colour of the task based on that? Is it something implementable on my end via a script?
Thanks,
Sam