I came across some odd behavior from Deadline, and I don’t know if it’s a bug or not, but I figured I’d mention it here. It seems that if you submit a Maxwell job to Deadline (version 3.033353) that has a number in the filename, the submission box automatically assumes you’re rendering an animation and autopopulates the number in the file name in the frame list, regardless of whether the render is actually an animation or not. If you don’t catch this when submitting the render job (as I didn’t the first couple times), Deadline drops the number from the name of the file it’s supposed to render.
For example, if you submit a file named “maxwelltest2.mxs” for rendering, Deadline assumes it’s a 2 frame animation, then tries to render “maxwelltest.mxs,” which may or may not exist. But oddly, when the file doesn’t exist, it doesn’t give any errors in Deadline Monitor or the log; it simply completes the render after a couple seconds and says it’s done.
Checking the “Single Maxwell File Job” when submitting gets around the problem. But I find it unusual that Deadline looks for a filename other than the one specified, and doesn’t throw up an error when that file’s not found, so I thought I’d flag it here. The issue doesn’t occur when rendering through Maxwell directly, probably because Maxwell already knows it’s not an animation.
Cheers,
Eric