Hi,
I’ve got a 1000 frame render going through Deadline at the moment that contains two area lights and a skylight for fill. Since these frames take up to an hour each to render, I’ve given them a low priority to allow more pressing shots to be rendered as soon as they’re submitted to Deadline. However, whenever the computers return to rendering that large shot, both the area lights are turned off with only the skylight for illumination. I don’t have time to test whether this happens on other shots (I’m in the middle of production) but it’s a bit odd that Deadline would be submitting Max files to the slave computers with lights turned off. Could this be an conflict issue with Deadline and Brazil?
Thanks,
Jon Rennie
Dinamo Productions
Which version of Deadline are you running? 2.5 or earlier?
How are you submitting to Deadline (are you using the old submitter, the new tabbed submitter, or the submission option in Monitor?)
Neither of these should touch object settings, but 2.5 with the new submitter interacts with the Brazil settings in some cases.
If you are submitting from Max 8 to Deadline 2.5 with the new SMTD 2.0 (the tabbed submission script), it has certain options to allow you to tweak settings from within the Monitor after the submission. It is possible that something went wrong there.
Select the job, press Ctrl+P for Properties, go to the 3dsmax8 tab and scroll down the properties list. The Direct Illumination group of controls should have all the switches found in the Brazil UI, including the checkbox for Area Lights. Is it checked or not? Also, all these settings are printed to the log file when the frame starts rendering. Check out the log file and see whether direct area lights are set to True or False when the customize.ms script is run before the rendering start.
Another thing to try - select the job, press Ctrl+D to open the repository folder, grab the MAX file and open it. Check the area light settings in Brazil and the Area Lights themselves in the scene. Are the settings correct? Does the file render correctly when run locally?
If you want to be sure the problem is not in the built-in submission script in Max, save the scene to a MAX file and use the submission dialog in the Montor. The file will just be copied over to the repository and should render just like it was saved.
Cheers,
Bobo
----- Original Message -----
From: Frantic_Deadline Listmanager
To: Recipients of ‘Frantic_Deadline’ suppressed
Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2006 11:43 AM
Subject: Deadline, Max and Brazil lights
From: “Jon Rennie” (jon.rennie@dinamo.co.uk)
Hi,
I’ve got a 1000 frame render going through Deadline at the moment that contains two area lights and a skylight for fill. Since these frames take up to an hour each to render, I’ve given them a low priority to allow more pressing shots to be rendered as soon as they’re submitted to Deadline. However, whenever the computers return to rendering that large shot, both the area lights are turned off with only the skylight for illumination. I don’t have time to test whether this happens on other shots (I’m in the middle of production) but it’s a bit odd that Deadline would be submitting Max files to the slave computers with lights turned off. Could this be an conflict issue with Deadline and Brazil?
Thanks,
Jon Rennie
Dinamo Productions
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Hi Jon,
Can you send us a couple task logs - one for a frame that rendered properly and one for a frame that turned off the area lights? You can access the logs by right-clicking on a task for a job and selecting Task Reports -> View Log Reports. Just copy and paste their contents.
Thanks!
Ryan Russell
Frantic Films Software
http://software.franticfilms.com/
(204)949-0070
Hi,
Thanks for the replies. I’m using the latest version of Deadline (we only installed it last week!) so everything should be up to date.
When I press Ctrl-P on a job, the Max8 tab doesn’t have any properties listed. I’m submitting the jobs through the latest version of RPManager so perhaps it’s not submitting all the information and that’s where Deadline is getting confused? Unfortunately I no longer have the problem jobs listed in Deadline - I had to quickly resubmit them to get everything done in time and didn’t think to keep them. However, I’ll do some tests either later today or tomorrow when I’m back in the office and post them here.
Jon Rennie
Dinamo Productions
Jon,
The properties I mentioned are not required, they are an added bonus of using the new submitter in Deadline 2.5 - we collect and send the settings of the current renderer with the job and have exposed most properties to the 3dsmax8 tab to allow artists to tweak the settings after a submission. For example, if you forgot to enable GI or discovered that the sampling is too low on a huge submission, it is faster to change the offending property in the Monitor than to resubmit the whole scene.
Not having these properties in the 3dsmax8 tab is not a problem and is normal when submitting via RPManager or any other submission method available (like the old 3ds Max submission script, the Monitor submission dialog or a custom 3rd party submission script)
Since this feature is relatively new and the only feature we ship with Deadline that could actually modify a Max scene before rendering, I wanted to make sure it is not the cause of your problem.
Regards,
Bobo
----- Original Message -----
From: Frantic_Deadline Listmanager
To: Recipients of ‘Frantic_Deadline’ suppressed
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 5:22 AM
Subject: Deadline, Max and Brazil lights
From: “Jon Rennie” (jon.rennie@dinamo.co.uk)
Hi,
Thanks for the replies. I’m using the latest version of Deadline (we only installed it last week!) so everything should be up to date.
When I press Ctrl-P on a job, the Max8 tab doesn’t have any properties listed. I’m submitting the jobs through the latest version of RPManager so perhaps it’s not submitting all the information and that’s where Deadline is getting confused? Unfortunately I no longer have the problem jobs listed in Deadline - I had to quickly resubmit them to get everything done in time and didn’t think to keep them. However, I’ll do some tests either later today or tomorrow when I’m back in the office and post them here.
Jon Rennie
Dinamo Productions
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Hi,
Actually, that’s a really useful feature I didn’t know about! I’ll see if RPManager can take advantage of it.
I haven’t had chance to bug hunt this afternoon but the problem did reoccur and I realised it’s happening when jobs are restarted on a slave computer:
e.g. I submit the job and all the computers begin rendering. Then I submit another job with a higher priority. All the machines stop rendering the first job and begin rendering the higher priority one. When that job is completed, they begin rendering the first job again but this time all the lights have been turned off.
Does each slave machine keep a copy of the rendering Max file locally or is it resent when they start or restart a new job?
Something else I’ve noticed is that querying a job’s properties takes ages, while if multiple jobs are selected, the properties panel appears immediately.
Cheers,
Jon Rennie
Dinamo Productions
Hi Jon,
The slave machine keeps a copy of the max file locally, but it is always copied over at the start of a new job. In your case, it would copy the max file over when it initially starts the job. When the higher priority job comes along, it would clear it’s current job data (including the max file) before copying over the new job data. Then when it goes back to the original job again, it would recopy that max file over again. I wonder if the problem your having is at all related to RPManager. Have you tried submitting a similar scene without using RPM to see if you run into the same problem?
As for the job properties dialog, the problem is that Deadline is using some really inefficient code to parse the extra options Bobo was mentioning. These options are only parsed when modifying single jobs, that’s why it’s speedy when changing the properties of multiple jobs. I’ve refactored the code, and it’s almost immediate now. This fix will be included in a future release (thanks for noticing!!).
Cheers,
Ryan Russell
Frantic Films Software
http://software.franticfilms.com/
(204)949-0070
>Since this feature is
>relatively new and the only
>feature we ship with Deadline
>that could actually modify a
>Max scene before rendering, I
>wanted to make sure it is not
>the cause of your problem.
Hi
Looks to me like a deadline bug, it is writing some of the new property controls regardless of whether the .job file contains them, and a default value is destructive:
In my RPM submitted max_job_info.job file, I include no extra properties to be controlled (yet:).
If I submit one of my files, all I see it is:
Padding=4
RestartRendererMode=false
UseSlaveMode=1
but if I RC on the job, modify properties, hit OK (without doing anything) this is what it then looks like:
Padding=4
RestartRendererMode=false
UseSlaveMode=1
ambientColor=
useEnvironmentMap=false
QuickFixScript=
lightTintColor=
BitmapPager=false
backgroundColor=
lightLevel=0
OverrideBitmapPager=false
The lightLevel of one would be it :) though others in there could be problems too.
Looking at the modify properties dialog, the light level is defaulting to 0, and this value is being written to the job file, then when the job is next picked up = no lights.
For the moment I will add some of the property calls to my .job file, I am assuming that will fix the problem as it won't try to use the a default of zero...
cheers!
grant