Hi, I have a couple vray animation done in 3dsmax I need to render, but I am having problem with my GI pre-calculation, I can’t figure out how to do it properly with Deadline.
I am using LightCache and irradiance map for my GI.
What I am doing now:
I set my render setting so that I don’t render the frame, set a few frames to render (example 0, 50, 100 for an animation from 0 to 100, I then hit render in 3dsmax, wait for the GI to finish calculating, then I save both map using the save map button in the UI.
I then set another scene where the irrandiance map and the light cache map a read from files, submit this to deadline and render every frame.
This is not a great workflow, I have to babysit my GI calculation, it’s pretty lame in my opinion.
What I want to do.
Set up a GI-precalculation scene with the same frame step (0,50,100) send this to deadline so that it will render my GI map, then send the 2nd scene that read the map file and render every frames.
I have tried the 2nd method, but the map are overriten at every frame!
When I do it in the max interface the map contain the data for all 3 frames, but on deadline the map only contains the data of the last frame!
Anyone know how to do it?
I am used to this workflow in Mental Ray and it work just perfectly, Mental Ray can read-and-append FG points to the FG map, but apparently Vray cannot…
Please help, I am not a rendering babysitter 
Sylvain Berger | Technical Director | Alpha Vision
Ok so after working a while with Vray and deadline, I think I have found a solution. That might require a modification of the plugin.
If I uses the vray multiframe incremental mode in the irradiance map and use the auto-save map feature plus the auto-save map feature in the light cache, I could render 1 GI map job.
Then my second jobs reading those maps.
The problem is I can’t tell Deadline to render a list of frames in one task!
Would it be possible to have an override that would override the frame range to use the frame in the scene?
This would create the job with only 1 task, this task would use the frame range from the scene. Then in the scene I could set up my frame range. Either 1 to 200 every 20 frames or a frame list 1,21,61,101,151,200.
This would be so cool to be able to do this, Render GI animation in fire-and-forget mode!
2 jobs with dependencies … wonderfull!
Thanks
Sylvain Berger | Technical Director | Alpha Vision
The “simplest” thing you could try to do without modifying Deadline itself would be to submit the Max file but not render it, instead submit it as a MAXScript job in Workstation mode.
You would provide a very short MAXScript that simply calls
max quick render
and thus performs the rendering as if it was running on a regular workstation. All in a single task.
Once the renderer finishes, your script would return TRUE and the job will be considered successfully executed. Then your dependent jobs would start…
Unfortunately, neither the current nor the future Max submitter provide the option to submit a scene as a script job (although we have lots of other scripts that do that). We used to have that option in an earlier version of the submitter but removed it for various reasons.
If you want, I could help you get a test running, and in the mean time I will add the option to submit a scene as a pure MAXScript job to the upcoming SMTD 2.0 script…
Cheers,
Borislav “Bobo” Petrov
Technical Director 3D VFX
Frantic Films Winnipeg
Thanks for the workflow explanation. I will wait for the next version of the submitter to test this. I have finished rendering the vray animations I had to render.
I should have a nice long break before I need to render other vray jobs. If I do before you modify the submission script, i’ll contact you for that script.
Thanks
Sylvain Berger | Technical Director | Alpha Vision