verbosity level and CPU usage (also some Mac problems)

Deadline
1

I really love Deadline but I’m wondering why it is that I can’t seem to control verbosity with Maya Mental Ray renderings with the -v flag that works with command line renders. The -im flag works fine but the slave app shows that it doesn’t recognize -v so the jobs fail. I really need to enable -v 0 since the Slave app’s readout can make mono take up to 10% cpu just printing output, which is way too much.

Also, I thought I’d report that the Mac version of Deadline has a couple issues I’ve noticed: the first was that the Deadline Repository permissions had to be manually changed to allow me to write to it even though I installed it and I’m an admin of the only local host machine where it’s used. Also, the Submit form for Maya has a default Maya Build option that’s not compatible with the Mac version - if you send a job with the 32-bit flag, it fails. You should probably change the Mac version to have the build check part of the script read like this:

if( $mayaBuildEnabled ) { if( `about -is64` ) optionMenuGrp -e -select (3) $mayaBuildBox; else optionMenuGrp -e -select (1) $mayaBuildBox; } else optionMenuGrp -e -select (1) $mayaBuildBox;

2

and the icons - hehe. let’s just say they look a little crusty

3

The problem might be that Deadline is already passing the -v argument, so when it sees it again, it fails. You could modify the Maya plugin to enforce a verbosity of 0 by opening up \your\repository\plugins\MayaCmd\MayaCmd.py in a text editor and changing this line:

rendererArguments += "-r mr -v " + str(verbosity) + " " + self.GetTileRenderArgument()

to this:

rendererArguments += "-r mr -v 0 " + self.GetTileRenderArgument()

Save the file, and you should be good to go.

This will be fixed in the next release.

We think we have figured out this problem. I’m guessing it fails with an error along the lines of “could not detect bitness”? Out of curiosity, are you on a PPC or Intel mac?

I’m assuming you’re referring to the icons in the job list? This problem only seems to affect PPCs, and we’re not sure why.

4

thanks - that fixed the verbosity. It would be nice if it was a variable you could set in the submit dialog. As for the error, the error reads:

Exception:TargetSite:Void RenderTask(Int32, Int32)

There’s no 64-bit Mac version of Maya so this is redundant on OS X right now.

I tried to copy and paste it from the Slave app but it doesn’t seem to work on OS X. Also, the scrollback is weird - it will keep scrolling with the feedback if you try and read the Slave log. I’m on an Intel Mac Pro Nehalem.

I was talking about the app icons that appear in the dock. They’re like 16 pixels scaled up and look like Windows 3.1 icons :stuck_out_tongue:

If you need a decent icon designer for cheap, there are plenty of people who submit here:
pixelgirlpresents.com/icons.php

it may seem superficial but people notice this stuff.

5

or you can buy a set of nice high-res canned icons like these:

iconexperience.com/x_collections/

6

We’ve logged the ability to control mr verbosity from submission as a feature request.

The copy/paste problem is a Mono thing, which we hope gets resolved in the upcoming Mono 2.6 update. You can find the slave logs in /Applications/Deadline/Resources/logs, or choose to save the render logs from the Monitor by right-clicking on them.

I would expect that eventually there will be a 64 bit version of Maya for the mac. Is that what the submission script is defaulting to? If it is, then that’s a problem we should resolve.

The auto scrolling is normal. You can split the slave log window into 2 by dragging down the upper border of the slave log. The upper log shouldn’t scroll.

Yeah, we admit our dock icons are pretty ugly. We’re working on new icons for the next release.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
7

The submission script defaults to 32-bit but it should default to None, which is what I changed the script to be.

really love the software though. That’s what counts - I couldn’t get Smedge working at all.

8

Hi guys,

Any luck getting the MR verbosity control at submission time into play?
We could really use it to track individual render issues while keeping the default at 0.

Cheers!

Dennis

9

It’s still on the todo list for the next release, which should be out around the end of November.

Cheers,

  • Ryan