We are having an issue during our upgrade from Max 2020 to Max 2024. This same issue happens when rendering our previous 2020 files in max 2022-2024 through deadline. These files all render fine locally, but not through deadline. We use Corona render.
We can get brand new files built in 2024 working fine on deadline, but opening a 2020 file or merging things in from one causes deadline to stop rendering them.
I’ve used the scene converter to remove mental ray DLLs, I’ve used scripts to remove any additional plugins. All assets are collected. These files all render fine via deadline using max 2020. The logs seem to be extremely vague and I am trying to pinpoint what is going wrong here. Can anyone shed some light on this issue for me?
Below are the job reports and worker logs from one of the jobs. I am aware Arnold complains but I’ve also removed that from the sending and receiving machines (a different machine) and it did not help.
Hello @Jonny
Thanks for sharing the logs. I looked at them, the error means that Deadline started 3dsMax but it has exited/crashed so Deadline has failed the task. From the logs it is not obvious why the crash happened. The only thing which stands out is a missing dll.
2023-10-26 13:28:13: 0: STDOUT: 00:00:04 1553MB WARNING | unable to load dynamic library c:\programdata\autodesk\applicationplugins\maxtoa_2024\openvdb.dll: T
I had tried what you linked a couple of years ago during our 2022 upgrade attempt and they also failed.
However, I have finally figured out what’s going on. It’s empty bitmaps. Not missing bitmaps, but ones where it has a folder with no filename. I am not sure yet why this occasionally happens inside max but if a file is sent to deadline on max 2022+ with an empty name in the bitmap node it will fail and it will not give an error identifying the issue. Removing any bitmaps which have lost their names allows the render to go through. We have made a script to automate the removal of these and are moving forward with the upgrade this weekend.
There are no error messages anywhere in the logs for max or deadline when this is encountered so it was quite frustrating. Apparently, max doesn’t think these bitmaps are missing so they don’t show up in any relinker or error log in any meaningful way. The only way I ended up finding these was max says it can’t read/write to a folder when opening which lead me down a rabbit hole and ended with me using pixamoons bitmap tracker and relinker to find and identify bitmaps that had no file extension.
Anyway. Hopefully this helps anyone who runs across it. Cheers.