Hey,
We’re fairly new to both Deadline (v7) and Renderman RIS (I guess most people are new to RIS!) so forgive me if i’ve missed something, but when rendering directly from Maya (2015) with Renderman’s RIS using the Deadline Submitter (MayaBatch with Deadline Job type: Maya Render Job), we get an error:
2015-03-31 10:39:22: 0: WARNING: Renderer rendermanris is currently unsupported, so falling back to generic render argumentsand the ends up rendering out incorrectly. Going through the slave log/task report indicates that the incorrect arguments are being passed to for Renderman to use RIS
2015-03-31 10:39:22: 0: INFO: Rendering with rendermanrisOfficially its
-r rman -risbut this isn’t list on Pixar’s documentation, only reference I could find officially appears if you run render.exe -r rman -h
Switching over to non Maya Batch and supplying the cmd arguments causes more issues as passing the arguments “-r rman -ris” crashes out due to duplicate arguments as it seems to append the arguments on the end of the originals.
So dumping the internal Maya submitter and moving to DL7’ Monitor’s Maya submitter gave me the option for “Render” to use Renderman (why isn’t this in the internal one?) but that still didn’t work as it didn’t supply or use the -RIS argument (seems to correctly use “-r rman” but doesn’t use the new switch for RIS which is “-r rman -ris”). So I switched the advanced options to supply only -rman -ris and only use these cmd line arguments but it fails because I didn’t set the output directory (-rd “c:\etc”). Added that switch in and it appears to work.
From the Job Properties - Plugin Info Parameters
SceneFile=Z:/Students/Piggy_animation/scenes/Animation/airport_set_asset.mb
Version=2015
Build=64bit
ProjectPath=Z:\Students\Piggy_animation
StrictErrorChecking=True
LocalRendering=False
MaxProcessors=0
FrameNumberOffset=0
OutputFilePath=Z:/Students/Piggy_animation/images
Renderer=Renderman
CommandLineOptions=-r rman -ris -rd "Z:/Students/Piggy_animation/images"
UseOnlyCommandLineOptions=1
IgnoreError211=False
Alternatively, I was able to get it to work via the Monitors CommandlineSubmission using:
Arguments=-r rman -ris -rd "Z:\Renderfarm\Piggy_animation\images\Scene_B\shot07_B" -n 0 -s <STARTFRAME> -e <ENDFRAME> -b 1 "\\fsww01\ccistuddata$\Students\Piggy_animation\scenes\Animation\Scene_B\shot07_B\03_shot07_B_test.mb"
Executable=C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2015/bin/Render.exe
StartupDirectory=
Side note
It appears that Renderman doesn’t like “$” symbols being supplied, and as we’re using UNC addressing and our share requires a $ (University + Enterprise IT) it crashes out. It is possible to ignore this somehow from deadline, ie slash it out? I’ve currently changed our repository setup on windows to use a mapped drive and for paths to be replaced to z:\ but its not ideal as we also use OS X (haven’t tested Renderman and OS X yet, so this may be a non-issue)
Feature Request:
Monitor - MayaSubmission
Adding a Renderman/RIS drop down option in the Monitors MayaSubmission which supplies the required “-r rman -ris”
Maya Internal Submitter
Add options to choose render like MayaSubmission as the scenes Render Globals didn’t work for Renderman/RIS (see above)