AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Ambient Occlusion (Mental Ray) render element won't render properly on my rendering PC

I’ve been running into this issue from time to time and I’m hoping someone can help me with this. I am using the free version of Deadline that comes with Krakatoa. So I am using my workstation PC and a dedicated rendering PC for rendering via Deadline. I am rendering with 3DS Max and Mental Ray.

The Ambient Occlusion render element only renders properly on my workstation PC. I get rendered frames from the rendering PC but they are blank - just black with no alpha channel.

The reflection and self illumination render elements seem to render just fine.

I attached a screen grab of my Deadline settings for the render elements.

Any ideas on what’s going wrong here?

Thanks in advance

Hmm. Not sure on this one yet.

Just to be sure, does it render properly on your workstation PC through Deadline? I just want to make sure we’re comparing the render process properly here.

Also, if it does work fine via Deadline, can you try running the render through the Max UI on the second machine? Just want to make sure it’s not a Max configuration problem.

Hi Edwin, thanks for your reply.

My Deadline render job did render the AO element just fine on my workstation PC. Also, I did just try to rendering through the Max UI on the second rendering PC and that time it rendered the AO pass OK. I’m not sure why my second rendering PC won’t render the AO element when the job is submitted through Deadline.

I also just ran into a separate strange and vexing problem - a render job I had running last night was rendering the top viewport, even though I double checked the settings in Deadline Monitor and the render window was set to Camera 1. I went back into my scene and Camera 1 looked fine, and my scene was not set to render the top viewport. I resubmitted the render job and now it seems to be rendering OK using Camera 1. I’m not sure why it rendered the top viewport last night. I’ve ran into this issue a couple times before and the problem is intermittent and not easy to reproduce. :confused:

Well, problem #2 may be because the viewport was locked. That’s been an issue with the Max API awhile. Notes from the docs:
Viewport is currently locked, which can result in incorrect renders with Deadline: The locked viewport setting in 3dsMax 2009-2014 is ignored in the SDK but is fixed in 3dsMax 2015 onwards.
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … s-max.html

Original problem is definitely not one known to me. Can you pass me the render logs from both sides? That’ll tell me things like your 3DS Max versions on both machines and Deadline versions. You might want to remove file names if they’re sensitive. You can grab them from here:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … nd-history

Sorry for not asking for those sooner. It’s usually our first line of attack here.

re: AO pass missing.
Might be path length > 255 so Windows OS fails to save it back. Quick test is send us logs as per Edwin request and try shortening overall file path you are saving to. Use SMTD “Sanity Check” as it will check pre-flight for any file paths being too long and therefore illegal on Win OS.

re: Camera pad-lock
Although it has improved with newer versions of 3dsMax, the logic of cameras when in min vs maximised viewports combined with the camera-lock is confusing and still not considered reliable in the eyes of the submitting user. I believe Bobo did a nice scripting fix to handle this way better, but I noticed it hasn’t gone into the current 9.0 SP branch, so we should probably do that. Are you on 9.0.4.0 already? If so, we could send you a patch to test out this fix.

Hey guys, thank you for your replies.

I actually deleted the render job that I had a problem with in the first place, and now I wish I hadn’t so I could send over the job report.

This morning I’m trying a test where I shortened the path length of the filename for the AO pass and I unlocked the viewport before submitting the new job. The correct camera is rendering and the AO pass looks fine.

I didn’t think the path name for the AO pass was too long the first time but who knows.

I am also using Deadline V8 right now, so I should probably update Deadline soon.

Perhaps just unlocking the viewport before submission solved my issues? In any case at least it’s rendering OK now. Thanks for your help!

We have a fix for v10 which I ported back to v9 today. It checks if the Viewport is maximized and the Padlock is on, and unlocks the view during the submission, but then re-locks it after submission. The code is rather simple if you want to add it to your v8 SMTD yourself:

  • Navigate to your Repository
  • Go into the folder \submission\3dsmax\Main\
  • Make a backup copy of the file SubmitMaxToDeadline_Functions.ms just in case.
  • Open the file SubmitMaxToDeadline_Functions.ms for editing in the MAXScript Editor, or a text editor like Notepad
  • Search for the line that looks like “local canSubmitQT = true”
  • Insert the following code block right BEFORE that line:
			local oldRendUseActiveView = rendUseActiveView
			if not rendUseActiveView and viewport.activeViewportID > viewport.numViews do 
			(
				rendUseActiveView = true
				try(SMTD_MainRollout.Ui_report "+UNLOCKED the Render View - the Current Viewport was MAXIMIZED!")catch()
			)
  • Search for the line that looks like “–If the merging of XRef objects was requested and there were any, restore the copy of the scene from the temp. file”
  • Insert the following code block right BEFORE that line:
			if not oldRendUseActiveView do 
			(
				rendUseActiveView = false --restore viewport lock if it used to be engaged. Won't be touched if it used to be TRUE (unchecked) anyway
				try(SMTD_MainRollout.Ui_report "+Restored the Render View Lock.")catch()
			)
  • Save the file.
  • Restart SMTD inside of 3ds Max - it should now unlock the view if it is locked AND maximized during submission. Non-maximized locked views should work ok in the most recent versions of 3ds Max…

Thanks Bobo! I’ll give that a shot. :smiley:

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