Hello,

In order to do what you want, you could also simply do 1-10x2, which would do every second frame. You can read more about formatting your frame list at docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … ng-options if you want to read up.

Thanks, I’m learning!

Up until now I’ve only been submitting jobs via the integrated submission script (I’m pretty new here so haven’t had time to do a lot of deep exploration), but now see that I can also submit directly from the Montior.

I had noticed already that the job submission panel (which I now know is the integrated submission script), does not have an explicit frame range field in it, taking the frame range from the scene file. But I notice that the Monitor submission panel does have this, as expected.

Is there a particular reason this is missing from the ISS panel? This is obviously a value that it’s useful to have direct access to within a render job.

Is this for the Maya in-app submitter? If so, it’s there, but you might have not noticed that the “Render Options” rollout in the GUI just needs to be expanded so that you can see it, as per this screen-grab from our Maya docs page:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … d_maya.png

Here’s a Deadline developer blog post on frame list formatting from Feb 2016, with a YouTube video which might help here as well:
deadline.thinkboxsoftware.com/fe … ng-options

Hmm, I hadn’t noticed and now see it, but it’s grayed out and uneditable?

Also, although it’s grayed out I can see that the frame list reads 1001-1490x2 (populated from the scene file?).

So I’m guessing that even if I enter 1001-1490x2 by hand instead of setting “By Frame” in Vray to 2, then Deadline is still going to display the frame range as individual frames (1001,1003,1005) instead of showing the overall frame range (1001-1490).

Is there really no way around this? We are working at 60fps but want to output first pass renders on twos to cut down on unnecessary rendering during shot development. It’s very inconvenient to not be able to see the correct overall frame range display in Deadline’s UI.

Correct, we respect the scene / render settings in Maya.

So, the “frames” column in the jobs panel currently displays frame ranges expanded, when the frame range is Nth based. I appreciate your point and I’ll raise it internally as a possible improvement in the future.

How about this for the time being…You could use one of the “ExtraInfoX” columns to inject what metadata info you prefer to see for the frame range (as per my example) say, at job submission time. You can also customise the column header name.

Screen Shot 2017-01-12 at 19.32.30.png1643×545 479 KB

Thanks, Mike, good suggestion and that is an easy enough workaround for our purposes.

I’m curious though why the Frame List field is grayed out in the Maya submission script UI? Is this normal, and if so why? I personally do prefer to be able to set my frame range in the render manager.

The frame list in our in-app submitter will be greyed out in Maya if you have under Maya -> “Render Settings” -> “File Output” rollout -> “Frame/Animation ext:” set to something which is saying: “…(Single Frame)”. You need to change this to something like: “name.#.ext” and then re-open our in-app submitter. This is a Maya thing.

That makes sense, but the frame name formatting rollout you refer to doesn’t appear in the Vray render settings (at least on my work installation here – I don’t recall if it does normally by default, but I don’t think so).

I tried switching to the Maya software renderer to check that it was set to name.#.ext, then switched back to Vray, but the Frame List field remains grayed out. I wouldn’t expect this to work anyway as that setting is renderer specific.

Oh. In VRay it is different. You have to change this drop-down to not be disabled and then re-load our in-app submitter for the change to take effect. I find it all a bit weird how that stuff works in Maya and each of the different renderers…but then again…that may just be me!

Screen Shot 2017-01-12 at 20.30.28.png472×698 118 KB

Yes, that was already set to Standard.

But now I’m finding that this works on a new scene file (Frame List field will be available), but not on my actual working scene files.

This is in Maya 2016 Ext 2 SP1, FYI.

Hmmm…not sure. It’s working fine for me here on Maya 2016 Ext 2 and Maya 2016.5. This is on the masterLayer which is the current render layer in the working scene file, right?

In a new scene it seems like it’s necessary to toggle off the “Render animation only in batch mode” off to get that field to enable.

But this isn’t working in the file I’m working on right now – can’t the Frame List field to enable no matter what.

I did some quick digging into it, and it looks like the enabled / disabled mode is driven by this Maya property:

getAttr defaultRenderGlobals.animation

Can you try running that in the MEL Maya script listener and see what number it returns? It should be ‘1’ for animation, ‘0’ for not.

I assume we disable it to prevent people from accidentally rendering a single image a few hundred times. Looking at the logic of the submitter it’s pretty deeply ingrained there, but if we can make it work a bit better, we should. It looks like we have some code in our function IsAnimatedOn() which has been commented out for V-Ray, so I’ll have to dig into why that is. Here’s what’s there:

// Returns if animation is enabled.
global proc int IsAnimatedOn()
{
	string $renderer = GetCurrentRenderer();
	
	int $anim = false;
	/*
	if( $renderer == "vray" )
	{
		if( IsOldVray() )
			$anim = `getAttr vraySettings.animation`;
		else
			$anim = `getAttr defaultRenderGlobals.animation`;
	}
	else
	*/
		$anim = `getAttr defaultRenderGlobals.animation`;
	
	return $anim;
}

Hey Edwin,

Do you mean that the “defaultRenderGlobals.animation” attr controls whether animation is on or off within Maya, or within Deadline?

Within Maya, “defaultRenderGlobals.animation” is the attribute on the main/vanilla Maya render globals. There is also a “defaultRenderGlobals.animationRange” attr that controls whether the renderer looks at the render settings or start/end (I assume this means timeslider?) for the frames to be rendered. But since nobody uses Maya’s renderer anymore this is all but obsolete.

Vray settings are controlled by attributes on the vraySettings node, so that could be part of the problem.

That code block is querying whether the current renderer is Vray or not, and returning the variable $anim from either the defaultRenderGlobals or the vraySettings, depending on the result. So, I’m not sure why that’s commented out, since the vraySettings node still exists.

That said, I did some experimentation with getAttr and setAttr on both the defaultRenderGlobals node and the vraySettings node, but no matter what settings I used I still couldn’t unlock the Frame List field within Deadline

I can’t see any other attributes in either node’s animation-related rollouts that seem relevant, so I’m at a loss to know why this particular scene file won’t cooperate. I’ll try some other scenes as I go and see if it keeps happening.

After setting defaultRenderGlobals.animation to True, you’ll need to restart the submitter, but it ought to work.

If you’re done with the whole adventure, you could just make the IsAnimatedOn() return 1 and that’ll force things. Probably not the best approach, but it should definitely enable that rollout (caveat: if I read the code properly ).

I went into the history, but there was a pretty beefy commit (probably whitespace fixes) that makes it pretty hard to find out when and why that V-Ray code was commented out. I’ll bring it up with our guys and see what they say about it.

Update:

After some sleuthing, we commented that code out 5 years ago for Vue 10 support… The original developer is still around, so I just have to find out if they remember why. I sure wouldn’t

So, it looks like it may have been an accidental commit. Would you be willing to uncomment out those lines in the “[repo]/submission/Maya/SubmitMayaToDeadline.mel” and test?

Unfortunately I don’t have admin privileges to do this.

Quite by accident, I’ve found the actual source of the problem, which is very simple.

There is a checkbox within the submission window “Submit Render Layers As Separate Jobs”.

Previously I’ve always had this turned on.

Toggling this off enables the Frame List field.

Glad you got it. We should have thought of that pages ago.

Ah well, it brought up some other interesting topics in the process