AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Big Studio Render Farm unsing Corona + Deadline

Hello.

we are 40+ Artists at EVE images (70+ Employees). We are using Corona as our Renderer of choice. We want a reliable Network rendering solution - based on Deadline.

What we are currently doing:

I wrote a custom submitter for Tile Jobs. It is submitting UHD cache Jobs seperately and takes care of important Corona Setting such as adaptive sampling. It does a lot more (like checking external files and stuff) but in a nutshell: it makes sure that all the tiles from rendered on different machines will fit without seams. so no bloom/glare, no camera distortion, no adaptivity, no time limit, no noise level limit and so on. we are basically disabeling a lot of cool corona features just to make it work.

Thats bad.

I recently wrote tools and defined a new standard for lighting at our office. As this is simulating lenses/cameras (and other stuff) the farm/distributing system we are looking for should be capable of all these things above. the normal tile/jigsaw rendering method of deadline can not produce that with corona. even if the camera distortion will work at some point, the sampling adaptivity might still not work and so on. while rendering nice bokeh, adaptive sampling is extremely important though… so my idea is the following now:

we have to use corona DR, as it seems to be capable handling all the requested features. But instead of just starting some corona DR slaves via Deadline, the job itself - so the master - should also render on the farm, not local.

This seems a bit tricky though. I would split up our 60 nodes into DR slaves and regular max job slaves. maybe even dynamically so it would adopt to the amount of jobs coming in (I guess this might somohow be possible with some code). but then? every submitted max job (with coronaDR internally enabled) would need to have some placeholder/wild-card rendernodes inside the CoronaDR slave list in order to render the job on just a fixed amount of free DR blades. “search lan during render” would result in one job using all free DR blades to render on, blocking other jobs. But using fixed blade names would result in fixed DR Blade groups that would not be dynamic enough.

I would like to find a solution that:

a: is capable of using all features of corona
b: utilizes and scales to all of the blades dynamically
c: is reliable
d: needs to be able to handle as much as 50+ Jobs a day

it does not matter if this involves some coding and stuff but it needs to be done. Also If someone has a better idea please feel free to share.

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

PS. I know that Thinkbox/Amazon is working together with RenderLegion/ChaosGroup to solve some of these issues. This is all fine and good but we need a solution very soon, so sorry if you feel pushed :wink:

Hi,
Thanks for the feedback. Really useful.
We already have logged a wishlist item to investigate if its possible to add Corona off-load DR support to Deadline. Nobody else has ever attempted to do this, so I don’t have a point of reference to infer if its possible or not currently.
Thanks,
Mike

Thanks for the reply!

as I am testing right now, I could find out that the Corona Master DR render instance only seems to work if you submit this job with “force worstation mode” enabled. Might be a Corona only issue but I still want to point this out.

with workstation mode enabled, I was able to reserver some blades for DR in one DL Job and use the other - real - Job to render. Still not very dynamic though (fixed DR slave list saved inside the maxfile…)

Is there any progress here? We are in need of an alternative to buckburner.

Corona DBR support was added in 10.0.14.1:
https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/products/deadline/10.0/1_User%20Manual/manual/release-notes.html#deadline-10-0-14-1

Corona 2 support was added in 10.0.18.1:
https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/products/deadline/10.0/1_User%20Manual/manual/release-notes.html#deadline-10-0-18-1

Have you had a chance to test these latest versions? (10.0.20.2 shipped this week)

1 Like

No, I am new to Deadline. Want to give it a try. The implementation is excellent news!

Woah! great news! I will test it as soon as i am back in the office! thank you very much!

still haven’t had a chance to test this - just too busy times… did someone else give it a shot?

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