So currently testing out a new workflow idea, the premise is, render to multi-layered EXR files with Jpeg previews for large renders. The Render Frame Ouput on the Common tab is not set to anything and the render resolution is controlled by VRay.
Only issue at the moment is that Tiles rendering doesn’t work with this way of rendering, doesn’t change the output to _tile_1x1_10x10_0000 for the EXR or for the Jpeg previews, and then the tiles assembly job doesn’t include the split render channels and the tiles assembly job fails because there’s only 1 output that’s just been over-written each time a tile has been rendered.
This is unfortunately a current limitation of the tile rendering feature. Currently, it can only work with the main 3dsmax output and its render elements. We haven’t looked at what’s necessary to support this with vray’s raw image output, or if it’s even possible.
Cheers,
Shouldn’t be too difficult Russell 
You just need to change the vray output to the same as the tile output rules… and the same for the extra channels at the Pre-Render stage.
The only difficult bit might be getting the tile assembler to recognise the tiles as the key name would be in the middle…
test_02__tiles_1x1_10x10_.VRayBumpNormals.0000.jpg
But surely not impossible guys I know you like a challenge.
D
It’s on the wishlist (it was actually already there), but I don’t think we’ll have time to look into it until after Deadline 6 is shipped (which is still a ways off).
The tile assembler paths are currently set via the Max SDK, which is renderer-agnostic. To do this, it may mean hooking into the vray SDK. I know it’s easy via maxscript, so maybe we just do that instead. Unfortunately, we are pretty tapped out right now with 5.2 being released around the end of the month. 
Ok so for a script solution, I need to be able to know what tile is being rendered at the #PreRender stage so I can set the Vray fileoutputs via script. can’t see any way of getting this out of the DeadlineUtil interface?
I’ll be able to hack the submitter to deal with the assembly jobs and I’ve modified a tile assembly job to test to see if having the “.alpha.0000” causes issues, which works.
Hmm, if you still had the Max output location defined, then the max output filename property (rendOutputFilename) should contain the tile output path, and you could use that to figure out what to set the vray output path to. Maybe you could even disable the max save file property (rendSaveFile) at that time to prevent the max output from actually being saved.
(EDITED by Bobo)
RendOutputFilename only returns the original filename at the Pre-Render stage, as I’m guessing deadline works over a commandline rendering option the filename output is passed to the render function directly. Is there any chance this could be made accessible via the DeadlineUtil struct in future? Or even just the task ID then i could query the DeadlineUtil.GetJobInfoEntry() to get the tile.
I think we could expose the task ID in the future. I’ve added this to the wish list.
Cheers,
That would be fantastic and would be useful for a couple of other ideas I’ve had too. Ready for 5.2?
Unfortunately no.
We’re planning on releasing the second release candidate to the beta board this week, and with our target date at the end of June, we just aren’t in a position to squeeze in new features.
Cheers,
We ended up having to build a 3rd release candidate, so we were able to squeeze this in last minute. We added a CurrentTask property to DeadlineUtil to get the id of the current task as an integer. So you will be able to play with this when 5.2 is released!
Cheers,
Fantastic, thanks a lot guys.
