Hello,
We’re having that weird problem where Deadline will not use the frame range from the scene and/or pass option.
sometimes, it will not submit all the passes selected in the Submit dialog box.
We’re running XSI 6.5 32bit and Deadline 2.7, everything on XP Pro SP2 64bit.
Vincent
Hi Vincent,
Just to confirm, the updated script I had emailed you a couple of weeks ago didn’t fix this problem? I’ve attached the script here just in case. To install, go to \your\repository\submission and rename the current XSI folder to XSI_backup, then unzip the attached file to the submission folder.
For the frame range/pass problem, as I had mentioned before, this is because Deadline gets the frame range from the current pass options and not the scene options. Now I don’t know if this is a bug with XSI, but if you modify the scene frame range and the pass is set to use the same frame range as the scene options, the pass frame range only gets updated with the new scene frame range when you open the pass render options. After doing this, Deadline gets the correct frame range. We’ll see if we can find a workaround for this, but I just want to make sure we’re on the same page first. As long as you can change the frame range in the submission dialog and Deadline respects this change (which the attached update should address), this shouldn’t be a problem.
For the passes not being submitted, we’ll see if we can reproduce this here.
Cheers,
In Deadline 3.0, getting the pass/scene frame will now work better. What we are doing now is checking if the pass is using the scene options for the frame range, and if it is, it pulls the range directly from the scene options. This gets around that little UI quirk I mentioned earlier. Of course if the pass is set to use its own frame range, Deadline will respect that as well.
There was a bug with submitting selected passes in 3.0, but that seems to have been resolved now. We ran a bunch of tests with different passes selected and it seemed to work fine in all cases.
Another improvement we will make is that warnings/errors will now be shown in a single dialog, instead of constantly prompting the user with questions.
All these changes will be included in the soon to be released beta 10, so if you’re on the beta board (which I think you are), you might want to check this out when beta 10 is released.
Cheers,
Hello Ryan,
The thing is that it was a random bug… It didn’t happen for two weeks and now, since yesterday, it’s back. I’ve check the pass options, the scene option and when I start the submit script from within XSI, the frame range is populated by some number that are not in the scene or pass option. So I modify this to what I want and click submit. Deadline still render a wrong frame range.
If I set the pass option to render 1-1, scene option to 1-1, save, click submit to deadline, the deadline dialog will show me 1-248. I then change this to 1-1 and submit it. The monitor shows 1-248 and the render farm renders 1-248.
I thought that we had it fixed with the new script, but it looks like it’s still there…
Have you ever seen moment where you click Refresh on the Deadline Monitor and it takes up to 5 minutes to refresh?
As for the beta 3, we can’t test it for now. We’ve got to much stuff on our plate… I hope it will clear up so we can have some time to try it.
Vincent
Hi Ryan,
I printed your reply (the one with the script attached) and gave it to one of the user having this issue.
He followed everything step by step and the frame range was still messed up.
This is the main problem… I don’t really care if the submit dialog is populated with wrong values… but when we change those values to something we want, the info is not passed to Deadline for rendering…
I have the script you sent me installed on the server… Could the problem come from somewhere else? Could the problem be with the .vbs in the XSI installation folder?
thanks
The problem wouldn’t (shouldn’t) be with with the .vbs file in the XSI installation folder, because it’s a very simple script that just calls the one in the repository folder. See if you can get him to replicate this problem with a very basic XSI scene starting from scratch (no external references or textures), and then you could send us this file and we could try and reproduce it here. I’m wondering if there are some settings that are getting saved with the scene file that Deadline is using instead of pulling the info from the dialog. This seems unlikely, but I’m running out of ideas on this one. We’ll keep poking away though until we get this sorted out.
Cheers,
hello Ryan,
here’s a scene created from scratch. When we try to submit, it gets a frame range not specify in the scene or pass option.
We change it in the submission dialog and when we submit it, it shows in the monitor with the wrong frame range…
Thanks
Vincent
XSI_DeadlineTest_v001.zip (1.23 MB)
Thanks for the file. There was an object saved in the file called SubmitToDeadline, which seemed to be causing the problem because it had old data stored that the updated submission script didn’t recognize. I found that if I opened the dialog, clicked the Close Dialog And Reset Options button, and then opened the dialog again, the submission worked as expected.
In 3.0, we’re changing how Deadline uses the SubmitToDeadline object to store sticky settings for submission. In the current version, Deadline checks if SubmitToDeadline exists, and if it does, it just uses those options. However, if those options are out of date and contain bad data, it causes problems like you’re experiencing.
In 3.0, we’re going to check if SubmitToDeadline exists, and if it does, we’re going to retrieve the sticky values from it that we want (using defaults if they don’t exist). Then we will delete the SubmitToDeadline object and create a new one from scratch. I tested this here with the scene you sent us and it worked like a charm. So expect a much improved experience with submitting XSI jobs to Deadline in 3.0! 
Note: the changes we made were pretty drastic, so we won’t be making these changes for the previous 2.7 scripts. If you want to make use of these changes, we recommend using the 3.0 beta.
Cheers,