I noticed recently that every once in awhile we will have a job send to the farm that doesn’t contain a plugin type. As a result it appears the job marks it as complete but doesn’t actually produce any renders from 3ds Max.

Has anyone experienced this or know what may be causing this? What is more interesting is our currently solution is to submit the job twice and that for some reason fixes is, but is certainly not ideal.

And the main issue here is, jobs are being sent to the farm for rendering and they are taking the expected amount of time to render, however NO actual exr’s (images) are being saved out. While investigating the problem, the only similarity between all the buggy jobs was the Plugin field being empty.

I have never seen or heard of this problem.
However, anything is possible if you are mixing SMTD with your own code, so let’s try to debug this in the obvious way - by following the function calls and inspecting the submission files.

We want to first figure out whether the JOB files passed to the DeadlineCommand call are missing the Plugin= value, or whether the value is lost after that point. In the former case, it would be my responsibility to deal with it as it would be a problem in SMTD. In the latter case, I would have to pass this on to the Deadline team responsible for the communication of DeadlineCommand with the database.

So let’s assume that you are calling SMTDFunctions.CreateSubmitInfoFile() without a customPlugin: argument. If you are not calling the function, then you would be responsible for the content of the file, so the whole conversation would be moot But if you are calling it, then we check to see if a customPlugin argument is unsupplied, and in that case we call SMTDFunctions.getPluginToUse() to get the sting to include in the “Plugin=” line. If it is supplied, then the supplied value is output in the line, so it becomes your problem again

Looking at the SMTDFunctions.getPluginToUse() code, it can only return “3dsmax” or “3dsCmd” (the latter if DBR is enabled and the 3dsMax Command Line option was checked). So there is no way that function would return an incorrect value.

There is also no way the JOB file can contain no Plugin= line at all, so in the worst case it would contain an empty string, or an incorrect string.

So now you should catch one of these cases and immediately check out the submission sub-folder SMTD creates if you are using the right approach with storing each submission’s data in a unique folder. If SMTD is open, you can use the Tools menu and select “Explore Temporary Submission Folder…” It will be somewhere like C:\Users(UserName)\AppData\Local\Thinkbox\Deadline10\temp\
Check the content of the sub-folder with the most recent date and time, and see if the “max_submit_info.job” file contains the correct “Plugin=3dsmax” entry. If it does, then the problem occurs later in the submission chain.

Let’s confirm the content of your .JOB file, and then we can see what’s the next step…

EDIT: I find it interesting that the ICON in front of the job knows the Plugin type, but the display column does not. What do the Job Properties say under “Submission Params” > “Job Info Parameters” ?