Render Elements issue

Krakatoa for 3ds Max
1

Im having some problems getting render elements to save when rendering through deadline 4.0. Rendering locally saves the elements out fine but as soon as you submit it to the farm no elements get saved. I thought it might be RPM and the cebas EXR saver (which got installed when we put final render on our machines) but I am submitting with the standard deadline submission script and have changed the output to tga and it still wont save REs. In deadline when you right click on the task you get the directories for the REs under “View Task Output” but there are no files there.
I had a look in the SMTD functions and the code that disables REs in Krakatoa is not there.
Any ideas?

Idealy we would want the REs to be saved out into a layered EXR, which the cebas’ EXR plugin supports, but even when you click on the add render elements button none of the krakatoa REs get listed. Is there any way to get REs into a layered EXR?

We are using 2010 SP1 x64 with final render 3.5SE and the Krakatoa 1.6.1.43756. I dont think we have the latest subscription update which I believe gives you another version of the EXR saver (same as the cebas one???)

2

I’ll have to look into this, since it seems pretty serious.

I don’t think so. The Max SDK isn’t clear about how one would do that.

3

Earlier versions of Deadline used to disable Render Elements when the renderer was detected as Krakatoa. This was because earlier versions of Krakatoa did not support Render Elements and the RE tab was hidden, but other render elements could be hiding there from another renderer like VRay.

When we added RE support to Krakatoa, we had to modify the SMTD functions to remove that disabling code. It is quite possible that 4.0 still does that. If you cannot update to 4.1, I can tell you what to remark from the SMTD Functions file. (In fact I think there is another post on this forum that explains that already).

EDIT: Here it is, 5 posts below yours :slight_smile:
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=4506

4

thanks bob, i had seen and checked that (as i mentioned in my first post :wink: )
Would moving to 4.1 help for this problem?

5

Right, I skipped half of the post. :slight_smile:
I have no idea what is going on. Hopefully Darcy can figure it out.
I would recommend using 4.1 in general, but I don’t see why it would fix this problem…

6

Can you please double check that the file: \YOUR-DEADLINE-REPOSITORY\submission\3dsmax\SubmitMaxToDeadline_Functions.ms for

(renderers.current.classid as string == "#(-1204370534, -399920359)")

I’m almost 100% sure that some variation on this is what is causing your problem. Please remove that part so that the end result looks like:

-- if rendering with krakatoa, ignore render elements
-- if output file is empty, check if rendering with vray and saving a raw image, and ignore render elements if so
if (renderers.current.classid as string == "#(1941615238, 2012806412)" and renderers.current.output_on and renderers.current.output_rawFileName != undefined and renderers.current.output_rawFileName != "" ) then
	format "IgnoreRenderElements=1\n" to:JobInfoFile
else
	format "IgnoreRenderElements=0\n" to:JobInfoFile
7

He already did, see my post :smiley:
It must be something else…

8

I had another look and it looks like it has the old code in it…
Sorry about that, I must have been looking at the wrong file (Stupid me!)

Ill try replacing the code with this as bobo’s thread mentioned.

if (renderers.current.classid as string == "#(1941615238, 2012806412)" and renderers.current.output_on and renderers.current.output_rawFileName != undefined and renderers.current.output_rawFileName != "" ) then

Sorry for the misleading info, im sure I checked it properly!

9

LOL, Darcy for the win! :mrgreen: