AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Deadline 3.0 sugestions/doubts

Hi Ryan

We are testing deadline for a week and already have some sugestions for future versions… :slight_smile:

Monitor

  • You have a “select all” option on every filter on the monitor, it would be more then usefull a “unselect all”. Imagine that I want to see only the completled jojs… to do that, now i have to unchech all the other options

  • On backburner (sorry the comparison) I had a option to “restart job” that was very usefull, on deadline you only have a “resubmit job” that makes a copy of the job and “requeue job” that is always unavailable and I dont understand what it does. I just want to have the ability to restart a job from the begining, to clean the erros or to recalculate a job from 0 with skiping existing frames that where bad

  • I have to apologize, but have to make another backburner comparison. On backburner it was very simple to see wich machines where assign to the job that was selected. When you selected a job the slave icon changed to tell you if that slave where assign to that job. That fixture is very usefull!

Since we are rendering using 3dscmd, I have also some sugestions regarding that

  • The 3dscmd script dont permit to submit a job and limit the machines for that job (whitelist/blacklist), unless you have grups or limit grups. What if I want to send a job to only one machine. I can send the job and change it after on the monitor but that don’t seems very practical.

  • I think that the sanity check on 3dscmd it’s not working

  • Gamma correction, I know that I already told you of this but I remind you again! :slight_smile: Before using 3dscmd we didn’t had gamma correction problems.

Now I have some sugestions/doubts in general

  • I think it would be great to have a help file that you could search for a specific word.

  • Does deadline as a web interface?

  • Can you explain me the way that deadline works with max? Why does deadline as to restart max between frames?

For now is all I can remenber, but I’m sure that I will remenber more later! :wink:

Best regards,
Mario

Hi Mario,

Monitor:

  1. If “select all” is checked in the drop down, just un-check it by selecting the “select all” option again - this will deselect everything.

  2. Requeue job is only available if the job has tasks in the rendering or completed state (you might have to refresh the job if necessary). Requeuing a job will do pretty much what you’re looking for. To clean out the errors, right-click on the job and select Job Reports -> Clear Error Reports. For skipping existing images, Deadline will respect what is specified under the Render Output section of the Max Render Options. This setting can be changed in the job properties in the monitor, under the 3dsCmd tab.

  3. In the task list for the job, there is a Slave column that shows which slaves are rendering which tasks. In the slave list, the slave row will turn a bold green when it is rendering, and there are columns to view which job the slave is rendering.

3dscmd:

  1. We can add the machine list to the submission dialog.

  2. Yup, seems to be broken. We’ll fix it.

  3. We aren’t explicitly doing anything that should affect this, we’re just running 3dsmaxcmd.exe and letting Max do all the work. Out of curiosity, which version of Max are you rendering with? Can you send us a test scene that reproduces this, along with information on how the gamma correction is setup on the machine the job is being submitted from.

Suggestions/Doubts:

  1. All of our documentation is online, and googling what you’re looking for should bring up hits. For example, I googled “deadline 3ds command” and got back hits to our manual.

  2. Not at the moment, and there aren’t any short term plans of adding one.

  3. With the 3ds Command plugin, Deadline just uses 3dsmaxcmd.exe to perform a render and waits for it to complete. 3dsmaxcmd.exe encompasses the entire process, which includes starting up Max, rendering the task, and closing Max. This is why we created the original 3dsmax plugin, which keeps the scene loaded in memory between frames and reduces the overhead of having to startup 3dsmax for every frame.

Have you tried going back to using the 3dsmax plugin since updating to the beta I sent you? We are using this plugin in production right now with 3dsmax and VRay without any issues.

Cheers,

  • Ryan

Hi Ryan

The renders are working fine now! We pretend to test the 3dsmax plugin again but now we are in heavy prodution and have already several maxs on the monitor that have to been rendered.

We made a test with exr to correct the gamma in post production, but (at least with 3dsCmd) the exr format is not saving the extra channels like zdeph, is this a bug? I had this problem with backburner but I thought it was a backburner problem!..

Thanks
Mario

Hi Mario,

The problem is that when you specify the output filename in the command line options (like we do when rendering with the 3ds Command plugin), all the output image formatting data (like additional channels for exr) gets reset back to their defaults. This seems to be a max problem, as the problem also occurs when you change the output path via maxscript within the 3dsmax maxscript listener. We get around this problem in the 3dsmax plugin because we change the output path via code in our plugin, as opposed to relying on 3dsmax or maxscript to do that for us.

When looking though the 3dsmaxcmd options, I noticed there is an option to toggle gamma correction on and off. While I would expect 3dsmax to respect the settings within the scene file, we might have to explicitly set this option during rendering. This may be the key to getting around this gamma problem (at least for the 3ds Command plugin). We’ll post our results after we do some tests.

Cheers,

  • Ryan

Yup, explicitly setting the gamma correction options on the command line appears to workaround this problem for the 3ds Command plugin. In the Deadline maintenance release, there will now be gamma correction options in the submission script. You will have the option to enable gamma correction and set the input and output gamma options. These options will then be passed to the 3dsmax command line application during rendering.

Cheers,

  • Ryan

Hi Ryan

When are thinking that the Deadline maintenance release will be out? :smiley:

Thanks,
Mario

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