Hi -

We updated to 9.0.5.0 last week and noticed that when we submit an Arnold export job from Maya, set to export .ass files locally and queue a dependent render, the arnold exporter runs with -sf 0 -ef 0. Looking at the code, it appears to only ever do that range, not the range set in the submit dialog or the render globals.

I’ve patched it locally to use the render globals range for the moment (around SubmitMayaToDeadline.mel:7468) with this:

int $range[] = GetFrameRange(); int $start = $range[0]; int $end = $range[1];

But I think it would make the most sense for it to get the range from the submit dialog and export .ass files for just those frames. If I get a chance to figure out how to that before you update I’ll post it here.

Matt

I’ll bubble this up to the dev team. I did some digging into the history so I could know when it broke but I lost it through some whitespace changes.

Thanks. I took a look at some of the other code in there and rejiggered this a little bit more so I’m now getting the range from the dialog this way:

		int $start = 0;
		int $end = 0;
		string $frameListArray[];
		
		if( $regionRendering && $singleRegionRendering )
		{
			int $singleRegionFrame = `intSliderGrp -q -v frw_tileSingleFrame`;
			$frameListArray[size($frameListArray)] = $singleRegionFrame;
		}
		else
		{
			string $frameList = `textFieldGrp -q -text frw_FrameList`;
			string $frameListParsed = CallDeadlineCommand( "-ParseFrameList " + $frameList + " False", false );
			tokenize $frameListParsed "," $frameListArray;
		}

and then adding the sf/ef args in a loop around arnoldExportAss like this:

		for($frame in $frameListArray)
		{
			string $evalExportString = $exportString + " -sf " + $frame + " -ef " + $frame;
			print ($evalExportString);
			eval $evalExportString;
		}

That seems to work well enough and lets us just pick up a couple of frames without re-exporting the entire render range only to render those couple.

The next thing I noticed is warning in the maya script editor “arnoldExportAss -sf 5 -ef 5// Warning: More than one renderable camera. (use the -cam/-camera option to override) //”. So I’d suggest also adding that option if the camera is selected in the submit dialog. I’ll get that added locally when I get a chance and post back if it works the way I expect.

So, interesting thing about re-generating only a subset because Renderman bit me before.

If Arnold supports shared assets between ASS files like RIB files do, it was possible for those RIBs to be missing data. We hit that specifically when doing frame-dependent jobs with Renderman where the shared assets weren’t written until the very end.

With start and end being zero, does it generate all frames or just the first one? I’m curious now if what it’s doing is by design or not.

At least in Arnold 4 it only generated the .0000.ass file, not the range in the dialog or the range in the render globals.