Hi forum
I have a 3DS Max scene with forest pack objects. Whenever I submit with either local or all xternal file references, the submission fails.
The maps are found by 3DS Max, but I can see in the log that they are not listed with the full local path in the submission, unlike other textures. So it seems that maps with status “found” in the asset tracker is a problem for Deadline, and it corrupts the submission.

If I relink all the forest pack maps so they are no longer just “found” but with a full path, submission works.
Attached are two screendumps of the case where submission works and when it doesn’t.

Is this an error specific for forest pack textures, has anyone seen this problem too?
I’ve never had this problem before and I’m sure I have submitted scenes with “found” maps before.
Would be wonderful if you could trust Deadline to submit all textures in a scene, no matter how they are found by 3DS Max. So you can be sure that what you render locally will also be submitted and rendered with Dealine on a farm.

/Thomas

submit-works.JPG812×723 166 KB

submit-works-no.JPG888×583 195 KB

Hi Thomas,

Thank you very much for the detailed report. Yes, we are aware of this problem, and plan to address it in an upcoming update of the Submit Max To Deadline integrated script.

Surprisingly, SMTD does not currently use the Asset Tracker at all. The historical reason for this is that when SMTD was first implemented (around 2004!), there was no such thing as an Asset Tracker in 3ds Max

Instead, SMTD scans all sub-anim tracks of all scene content to identify objects and renderer properties that have an external reference. However, 3ds Max also has a very hard-to-control mechanism for loading files implicitly if their paths are invalid or missing by searching through both the folder where the .MAX file was loaded from, and through all Map Paths defined in the configuration. So textures with not fully resolved absolute paths can cause problems.

At the same time, we rely on exactly that implicit resolution of external reference paths for sending the textures with the job - we actually strip the paths before saving the scene for submission, and when the Deadline Slave loads that scene for rendering, it ends up loading the files found in the job folder.

Unfortunately, the current mechanism relies on knowing both the path to be modified, and the object that owns it. However, the Asset Tracker has no mechanism for providing this information, so it is not a simple drop-in replacement for the existing mechanism. We expect significant difficulties in switching to the Asset Tracker for collecting assets for submission, so we wanted to keep this change for a major version. Right now our goal is to get it in Deadline 10, but we will see how that will work.

On a related note, we have fixed the error message in SMTD for Deadline 9 to report the exact reason for any DeadlineCommand failure instead of the cryptic “UNKNOWN REASON” one.

Thank you for the suggestion and for your patience!