heya, we’re trialing deadline after fighting spider for a few months. So far it seems to be going ok, apart from something that was plaguing our spider renders too.
Mayabatch will crash occasionaly, popping up a dialog box we sometimes see if maya crashes in GUI mode. You probably recognise it:
‘fatal error: attempting to save in c:/blah/blahBlah.ma’
If we click ‘ok’ then deadline recognises maya’s crashed, and requeues the task. Fine if we check in during the day, not fine if it happens overnight.
I’m currently writing a little autohotkey script to click the dialog away, but wondering if anyone else has seen this behavior, or can offer any advice?
I fear it might be due to our setup; we’re running win2000 server boxen, which alias say should run fine, but they don’t officially support them either. Ick.
Fairly standard setup:
Maya 7.01
10 dual xeons, 2gb ram
win2000 server on the render boxes
central win2003 server
big ol’ 1.9 terabyte raid
gigabit througout
Our scenes aren’t too crazy either:
maya software
single depth map shadow
2 to 3 characters
simple set
2 mins a frame to render on average
scene sizes between 35 and 90 mb.
Cheers all,
-matt
Hi Matt, we used to have Spider here too and switch to Deadline. I suggest you switch to Deadline, we don’t have any problems here with Deadline.
As far as your problem, I have never seen this problem here. Maybe because we are using Win XP.
Maybe the best bet would be to upgrade to XP, although this might be a complex fix for your problem because of license cost and everything.
Just wanted to point out that we render hundreds of scene per week, thousand of images outputed a week, we render 100% on Maya/MentalRay and I never had this problem. with roughly 150 computers connected to Deadline.
Good luck.
Sylvain Berger | Technical Director | Alpha Vision
Hey Matt,
I’ve never seen maya display a popup during command line rendering before.
Deadline does support popup handling though, which you can enable by opening up the Maya.dlinit file in //your/repository/plugins/Maya and adding this line (just place it after the line "ConcurrentTasks=True):
UsePopupHandling=1
Now whenever maya displays a popup, Deadline should catch it and report an error. If down the road you find that maya is popping up dialogs that aren’t fatal to your render, you can add handlers that press the appropriate button to allow the render to continue.
Let us know if this at least catches the popup dialog for you.
Cheers,
Ryan Russell
Frantic Films Software
http://software.franticfilms.com/
(204)949-0070
Ho… This is very good to know!
Sylvain Berger | Technical Director | Alpha Vision
Aaah, thats great, thanks Ryan. Have added that option (after working out the autohotkey script, bugger), will see how it goes.
Judging from Sylvain’s comments, and from a quick chat with chris at shynola, it looks like its win2000 server causing problems; I’ve added a few of our XP workstations to the farm, they appear to render without a hitch.
Unfortunately we’re running rental machines, and they won’t let us install alternate OS’s. Damn them all.
Thanks for the quick reply!
Cheers,
-matt