Hi, we banged our heads on this for a bit now and can’t seem to find any more clues.

We first simulate a FumeFX cache on AWS and this works fine.

Rendering this same cache on a local slave produces correct output.

However, on AWS the render passes fine without errors, yet the resulting frames are blank. Note that the cache files are correctly included in the AWSAssetFile entries of the job info.

Some things we did so far:

• Add .fxd and .fdc to the file extension whitelist - did help to copy out everything during simulation; apparently this list is also used to filter upload files for the render.
• Select “Copy all files to repository” from SMTD - the assets were copied, but this didn’t change the end result.
• Rendering another scene (without FFX) produces correct output.

Any ideas what else could be wrong? Going to send some logs shortly.

Here is the slave log for the job in question

I’d like to mention that in the log above, there is a warning about the frame not being located on c:
However, this warning also appears on normal renders, which do produce output.

Hmm. Well, it does look like the render is short circuiting and doing nothing.

Do you have the first task for this Slave on this job? Because Lightening (the secret plugin for 3DS Max) keeps things loaded between frames, the problem may actually be outlined while the scene is loading up.

Because of the fancy asset tooling for AWS Portal, it’s more difficult to test these sorts of things on the machine because event if you were to start a stand alone instance you can log into, the asset paths are not going to be valid…

We’ll work backward from that first task log and see where we get.

Hi Edwin,

here is the log.

best,

Lyubo

Today I tried the same thing with Phoenix FD instead of Fume FX, and it also results in empty frames. Probably need to verify that simulated caches are being uploaded correctly?
Any ideas for debugging are welcome.

We lost uploads during the upgrade, but I didn’t see anything obvious when I read it last week.

Can you send a few really small tests here and I can try and run them through and see where it’s failing? I’m in somewhat uncharted waters and I’d like to play around here to figure things out. I’ll also run this by one of my colleagues to see if anything stands out to them.

Here is an example scene containing a FumeFX grid, and a Job script which runs the simulation.

• As noted, the simulation works fine and the results are correct (also on AWS).
• The problem is trying to render the same scene afterwards, using SMTD, on AWS slaves.
• The frames that return from the render are blank
• The job gets correct AWSAssetFile entries (for the caches), which rules out a few causes.

CloudRenderCachesProblem.zip (25.9 KB)