Hi,
with the Deadline Slave 2.7.27948 I’ve run into a strange behaviour. I didn’t find an appropriate topic with the forum’s search. The situation is that I have two machines running the Slave; both render Maya 8 jobs. One of them does it the way I expect it to. The other one completes a task and then restarts the very same task over and over again.
On this machine the Slave throws an exception everytime it finishes a job.
— --- —
RenderPluginException – Exception during render: Error: No object matches name: renderManGlobals
This error was printed by Maya. If this error message is unavoidable […]
RenderPluginException.Cause: JobError (2)
Exception.TargetSite: Void RenderTasks(Int32, Int32)
Exception.Source: DeadlinePluginLoader
Exception.StackTrace:
at Deadline.Plugins.PluginLoader.RenderTasks(Int32 startTask, Int32 endTask)
at Deadline.Plugins.PluginLoader.RenderTask(Int32 task)
at Deadline.Plugins.Plugin.RenderTask(Int32 frame)
at Deadline.Slaves.SlaveRenderThread.RenderCurrentTask()
— --- —
The term renderManGlobals doesn’t show up in the other Slave’s log. And although I’m not sure what it means it seems to be part of the reason why this Slave doesn’t work correctly. This faulty Slave actually does its job. When I check a frame it looks fine. A few seconds later the Slave starts again and overwrites the image.
As far as I know both Maya installations are configured the same way. I didn’t find a difference. And the only thing renderManGlobals reminds me of is Pixar RenderMan which isn’t installed on any of the machines. Nor has it ever been installed. Well, as far as I know.
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to resolve this issue? I’d gladly accept any hint you can give.
Sven
Hi Sven,
Deadline is configured to fail tasks if certain error messages are parsed from the stdout, which includes the error message you posted. This is normal behaviour and in this case, Deadline keeps trying to render the same task because in its eyes the task has never completed successfully (even though the render produced a frame).
There are two options in this case:
1) Try to figure out why Maya is printing out that error in the first place, and resolve the issue.
2) Edit the script file \\your\repository\plugins\Maya\MayaErrorParsing.ffs (I'm pretty sure that's the filename - I'm not currently in the office) so that it doesn't fail on that particular type of error message.
If you decide to try Option 1, the first step is to figure out if the error message that Maya is printing out is a direct result of rendering with Deadline, or if it is a more general Maya problem. This can be done by opening a command prompt on the offending slave machine and rendering the scene using Maya's Render.exe with the exact same command line arguments that Deadline is using (this is printed out in the render log). If you still see the error message, then we know that the problem isn't directly related to Deadline, and that Deadline is just relaying the error message.
The renderManGlobals object is definitely from Renderman For Maya. It sounds like there is a reference to it in the scene you're trying to render, so perhaps Renderman was installed on the workstation but not on the slave machine? One thing you could try is to create a new scene on the slave machine and try to render it through Deadline. Since the slave doesn't (appear to) have Renderman installed, you shouldn't run into any problems.
Hopefully these tests help diagnose where the problem lies. My guess at the moment was that RM for Maya was installed at some point on the machine that the scene was created on, and somehow a reference to it made its way into the scene.
Cheers,
- Ryan
Alright, I’ve read the suggestions and am going to try option 1 - figuring out why the Deadline log shows this message in the first place. I’ll report back with the results of both the command line test (without Deadline) and a fresh Maya scene.
Thanks for your help!
//edit: 01 Oct 2007, 5:30 PM
Ryan, I’m done now. First of all the solution: eventually I changed the MayaErrorParsing.ffs file. I added
— --- —
if(StrFind(GetRegExMatch(0),“Error: No object matches name: renderManGlobals”) >= 0)
ignore = true;
Now if this error shows up the Slave ignores it and just starts the next task. Which is fine with me since all frames render completely despite this error. All other cases of “No object matches name” are still treated the same way they were before.
What led me to this solution were the tests you suggested. Rendering locally with the command line render.exe yielded the same error message that the Deadline Slave showed in its logs. So the cause wasn’t the Slave but the Maya installation on that machine. Then I rendered locally within Maya. All images rendered perfectly, mental ray didn’t print error messages to the Script Editor. In the Render Settings I switched “export verbosity” from its default setting to the highest value of “Detailed Messages”. Still nothing showed up.
I created a fresh scene with a plane, a cube and a spotlight. Same results: the command line render.exe ended with an error message, Maya itself didn’t. I then searched for files and folders containing “renderman” and the only suspicious thing I found was a script in the folder of the recently installed Shave and a Haircut.
Now messing with that tool - even uninstalling and re-installing it for testing purposes - isn’t an option for this machine right now. I decided to change the FFS file you mentioned. The error message still shows up but the Slave doesn’t care anymore.
Thanks for your help!