Deadline and Vray - Discuss!

[m_hinks]

Hi all,

After seeing some people on here recommending Frantic Films Deadline for render farm management as a replacement for Backburner, I took the plunge and installed the free two nodes and gave it a go. And I am very pleased to say its BRILLIANT!!

Very easy to install, and the control you get is second to none, with access to near (if not all) vray render settings from the monitor. There are some nice graphs to show each nodes, and jobs memory and cpu use through frames. I think Deadline can pretty much netrender any software your likely to use!!

Having got my two free nodes rendering out vray multilayer exr animations, used Nuke PLE to work some 32 bit magic and After Effects to comp together with some editing, we got another 5 nodes. The only down side being you cant keep your two free nodes, so to get 5, you have to buy 5, but another 3 is not to be mocked!

So my question is this, who else here uses Deadline and do you have any tips and tricks to make our lives easier with 3dsmax, vray, Nuke, After effects, and others?

If you, like me, have been bitten once too many times by Backburner, then I would definitely install the two free nodes, and try it out. But be warned, you'll never go back!!

Looking forward to hearing from others experiences.

Mark

[joconnell]

I had a few issues with it - one being it didn't play nice with xsi at all (frantic themselves don't use it in house so the support ain't the best on that app) and oddly enough it was less stable and slower to render frames than backburner! I'll be going back to it soon enough so I'll let you know second time around.

[m_hinks]

Interesting about 3dsmax rendering slower than on Backburner. Ill have to look in to that, and see if Frantic know this!!

[joconnell]

It might be something to do with network congestion in here but I found the bb render times better. The management aspects of deadline are far superior but again, we dropped it since the xsi support was bad and for me backburner was quicker to set up and rendered faster.

[squeakybadger]

Been playing with Deadline since stumbling on this thread yesterday. Mightily impressed so far, apart from the fact vray dr spawner locks the 3dsmax process access after you quit it.

[m_hinks]

I had a few issues with it - one being it didn't play nice with xsi at all (frantic themselves don't use it in house so the support ain't the best on that app) and oddly enough it was less stable and slower to render frames than backburner! I'll be going back to it soon enough so I'll let you know second time around.

Was just wondering if you had now used Deadline more with max, and if your still seeing the slowdown problem? Im trying to find some time this week to test it and see. I'll be letting Frantic know if it is an issue!!

Thanks

[sjmoir]

Mike Owen from Burrows nVisage was demonstrating Deadline on Wednesday evening at 3ds London this week. He knows pretty much everything about it; if you have any questions come along next month and buy him a drink.

[m_hinks]

Interesting, I have been last year when I was in London, but living 2h out of london makes it a bit tricky!! I wonder if he's on this, or other forums?

Thanks Simon.

[panthon]

In my tests with VRAY, I've noticed Deadline doesn't show the vray framebuffer, but one similar to the one in 3dsmax. Therefore what you see doesn't have proper gamma and it makes difficult to judge if everything is allright. IS there any way to force deadline to show vrayframebuffer?

[MikeOwen]

Prime Focus (Frantic Films) have identified issues with having the VRAY frame buffer visible during network rendering. Therefore it is wired to be automatically disabled upon submission from 3dsMax using their SMTD. However, like all things in Deadline, its highly customisable via the hybrid MAXScript / Python submission system. Why do you need to see the framebuffer when off-loading to a render cluster?

[^Lele^]

I spent NINE months @ Frantic trying to fix the VFB issue, working very closely with Ryan (DL dev) and Bobo.
It is NOT a trivial thing: at the time i was there, DL would want control over frame buffer generation, and that would conflict with vray.
We managed to make it work for us with VRay at one point, but that was to create tiled EXRs in two specific productions. We ended up rendering a few tens of thousands frames with it with no problem afterwards, but then again it was exactly tailored to our use, and it was an internal build.

From the scripting side, the SMTD is not a simple piece of code: do NOT attempt editing it, as it WILL bite you in the arse when you least expect it.
It's made to submit with many a different renderer inside max, and the recursions of code within it are humongous and extremely complex: i once added ONE line of code, and broke it in three different places, in ancillary scripts. When i went to Bobo asking what i did wrong, and he looked at the code, his reply was "Hell if i know why it's not working!".
That's the last i remember before passing out.

Ryan doesn't use by himself all the myriad applications DL supports: so my best suggestion is to prepare a case, with a white paper outlining the issues and the wanted behavior, attaching a few files with the relevant settings (even screenshots might do it), and take the case at heart.
He will be extremely kind and supportive, of this i am sure.

My 2 cents

p.s.: i have no recent experience (since a year ago) with either DL or the SMTD scripts, so maybe they rewrote bits from scratch and it's now very easy to customise. Take my post with a pinch of salt.