I’m using latest deadline 10.2 and I have enabled some path mapping in my repository with windows and linux paths for mixed farm rendering as mentioned below,
I’m trying to render silhouette 2022.0.3 with path mapping enabled in silhouette plugin configuration. When every a frame starts rendering, I’m getting “could not read project file: not well-formed” as mentioned in below screenshot but the job getting completed with no output frame written.
In the above scenario i can see the project.sfx file size getting differ while copying from original server location(2254 KB) to worker’s local temp location(4532 KB) which is causing the project file read issue. If i turn off the path mapping in silhouette plugin then rendering happens fine. Please help me with this. Is this a Deadline bug or do i need to change some configuration in repository.
This looks like a Deadline bug, though I’m not sure what’s going wrong here.
When pathmapping is enabled for Silhouette, and there are rules to apply we create a copy of the scene file and make changes within it.
If possible, would you be able to put the original copy of the project.sfx and the copy in Deadline’s temporary directory into a file compare program (something like KDiff3 or Notepad++) to see what’s been changed?
If you’ve got short rules it could be that Deadline is matching on the wrong data inside the scene file and creating the corruption. Something like this:
What that rule will do, is it will match on any instance of ‘E:’ and replace it with ‘/mnt/nas/11_Stereo’. So if inside of the project.sfx file there are lines like:
FILE: /path/to/file.png
that’ll become
FIL/mnt/nas/11_Stereo /path/to/file.png
which is obviously going to break things.
If you’re not sure, you can either share those files with us via the ticket system at awsthinkbox.zendesk.com or you can share the files here if there’s nothing confidential in them. I’m not familiar with what’s actually stored in a Silhouette scene file, so be wary.
Hey Justin,
I have already tried comparing both files but unfortunately .sfx files are not in readable format and in compressed format.
And also it doesn’t matter whatever the mapping rules I have in repository, if i enable path mapping in silhouette plugin config, i’m facing same “not well-formed” error, even if i give some dummy paths as mentioned below,
I’m attaching the original and worker’s local copied project.sfx files for your reference. Please check and let me know if you require further information for debugging.
project_file.7z (3.9 MB)
Right you are, that’s not exactly human friendly stuff.
I know our Silhouette plugin has not been touched in a long time - I’m wondering if at some point in the past Silhouette files did have paths in them but have since changed.
As a part of path-mapping, the file is copied locally to the worker then read, edited and saved back out line by line. Something in that process is changing the contents of the file.
Given these files don’t have any file paths in them that we can find I think you’re going to be best served turning off path mapping in the Monitor under Tools → Configure Plugins → Silhouette.
Without clear file paths in the file itself Deadline’s path mapping won’t work and we’d instead have to use pathmapping tools available within Silhouette. We do this in Maya and Houdini for example.
I’m not finding anything in the Silhouette docs to say it’s possible though. Are you able to cross-platform render without pathmapping, or do you get failures when Silhouette goes looking for a Windows letter drive on the Linux worker?
I found a setting in silhouette preferences called ‘compress project data’ under project preferences which is enabled by default and will compresses the project data while saving. If we turn this off, then project files are saved in readable format which works fine if path mapping enabled.
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Nice find! Thank you for letting me (and anyone else finding this thread) know! I’ll update our runbook so if anyone else encounters this issue we’ll know what to recommend.
