psd-manager for 3ds max (a PSD exporter) creates references to render elements to essentially attach data to them. SMTD breaks those references because the Rebuild Render Elements option deletes and recreates the render elements without maintaining the references.
I modified the Deadline MAXScript function to work around this for a customer, but this would need to be redone on each Deadline update. To psd-manager users it is not obvious why all render elements are exported with default settings when going through Deadline.
Why is this option enabled by default?
Is there no better option just to clean those PBBitmap members of IRenderElement?
To me this seems to be the only reason this is done.
I’m happy to provide the changes I made for inclusion into Deadline but they are specific to psd-manager. Modified version of the script SubmitMaxToDeadline_Functions.ms from Deadline 10.1.9.2
– psd-manager support 1/3 begin
local AR_ElementReferencedBy = #()
local AR_PSDMgrLayers = #()
for i = 1 to NumEffects do
if (classof (getEffect i) == psd_manager and isProperty (getEffect i) #layersProduction) do
join AR_PSDMgrLayers (getEffect i).layersProduction
– psd-manager support 1/3 end
– psd-manager support 2/3 begin
append AR_ElementReferencedBy #()
for layer in AR_PSDMgrLayers do
if(isProperty layer #renderElement) and layer.renderElement == theElement do
append AR_ElementReferencedBy[AR_ElementReferencedBy.count] layer
– psd-manager support 2/3 end
– psd-manager support 3/3 begin
for refMaker in AR_ElementReferencedBy[i] do refMaker.renderElement = theElement
– psd-manager support 3/3 end
The RebuildRenderElements was contributed by another user of Deadline developing a 3rd party tool for render pass management. The main reason it exists is a bug in 3ds Max where changing the extension of render elements to conform to the extension of the render output of 3ds Max could cause incorrect file format output - e.g. an .EXR file with JPEG content. I had a customer last week hitting that problem in a custom submitter, although I could not reproduce his problem on my installation.
The function could be suppressed for the whole Deadline installation via the Repository configuration of SMTD - locate the folder (Repository)\submission\3dsmax\Main\ and look for the file SubmitMaxToDeadline_StickySettings.ini. Open it and modify the key
Save the file, and open the file SubmitMaxToDeadline_Defaults.ini. Locate the same key and modify its value to false. Save the file. Reopen SMTD. For new scenes, the default value of Rebuild Render Elements will now be False. Should the user switch it to True, it will persist for the current scene and save with the file, but future new scenes will default to False. If you don’t want it to load from existing scenes, edit the file SubmitMaxToDeadline_ExcludeFromSceneStorage.ini and flip the value of the same key to true so it does get excluded from the .MAX file storage.
You can instruct your customers to use this approach if they don’t want to rebuild Render Elements.
I can take your modification and submit it for inclusion with future builds of Deadline, but it might take a month or two before it makes it in…
