Maketx make my life simpler?

[squintnic]

Thanks Lele.

I definitely installed it, albeit via the annoying other route with the whole Amazon stuff. I remember it telling me that it wouldn't run on a single machine as slave/master so maybe I installed a completely different version (the cloud one)?
No idea. Very odd indeed.

I'll give it another go when I get a moment, using your link (as I uninstalled everything anyway), purely to see if it can do the same as what BB ultimately did very well.

I am technically illerate, really I am and I set it up in a few hours, following only the Amazon web instructions and one youtube vid.
Free for 10 nodes regardless of CPU / GPU count.

Def worth the time. I cannot believe commercial businesses still use Backburner. I know a handful of backwards arch vis businesses that persist with it...tragic.

[fixeighted]

Well yes, I didn't like BB over the years, as there were always issues with the setup.
But for this particular project I just needed something that would solve the specific issue I had, which BB did, plus for whatever reason, I had no issues with its setup.
The last time I used it in a studio setting with many machines was a long time ago and Deadline or similar did not exist (or was under my radar/cost-prohibitive) at that time, so no choice really.

My general motto is 'whatever gets the job done', so, whether generally crap or not, BB totally solved my problem on this occasion

[fixeighted]

So the first thing I noticed is that the version I had downloaded/installed was 10.1.15 and with the installer you linked lele it installed in a far simpler way (thanks also for your 'idiot's guide' instructions which certainly helped this morning...a tad hungover ) and I now have it working. So YAY!

Thanks also to Morbid Angel for the mention of the 'restart renderer between frames' option, which should do exactly what I did want at the time; just about to test this on a problematic sequence.
Although the job is done now, this all will be of use for future work I'm sure.

I do like a happy ending

[^Lele^]

So the first thing I noticed is that the version I had downloaded/installed was 10.1.15 and with the installer you linked lele it installed in a far simpler way (thanks also for your 'idiot's guide' instructions which certainly helped this morning...a tad hungover ) and I now have it working. So YAY!

Super glad to hear you got it somewhat sorted.
But i'm ^Lele^ , eheh

[fixeighted]

Problems unfortunately.

On submitting the job it runs through a few things in the process but the hangs completely at the stage in the attached.
The only way out is to end task.
I tried on a very simple scene and it works fine, so clearly it has something to do with the vast amount of texture files in the actual scene, as even earlier, after first installing, when I accidentally clicked the 'Assets' tab it again just hung whilst presumbly trying to populate that list with all 260k bitmaps rather than just the 45 .ifls that it uses and that the log refers to.
I have tried unchecking the 'pre-cache asset files on AWS', plus choosing to 'save and use current....network path' but the same hang occurs.

Is there a way around this apparent issue? BB does not exhibit this problem and starts immediately, so this issue has already got me scratching my head, as it's clearly not only me who will use a large amount of data in scenes.

EDIT: I meant to add that although I can eventually cancel submission, Max still hangs, needing task kill.

[^Lele^]

I have no idea of why AWS keeps popping up for you.
It doesn't for me, so perhaps in there lies the issue.
Ensure you installed it properly, and ofc, reboot at least on ce to make sure all the bells and whistles come up.
You'll also want to run the monitor at least once, and in super-user mode, so to edit groups, pools and so on (even if you only have the one machine.), before submitting the first job.

[fixeighted]

The AWS entry is just in the Deadline/Assets panel. It was actually checked so I unchecked it.
I installed exactly as per your links and process description. Rebooted.
I ran a teapot job to check stuff was working before trying the large scene, and that worked as I'd expect it to, so it is definitely linked to the large scene and its bitmaps.
I cut down the scene to include only 360 bitmaps out of the total 260k and that will submit just fine.

So my conclusion is that Deadline simply cannot deal with that amount of bitmap data, as part of the process is to look for and reference all 260k frames in order to begin rendering, which seems a bit silly.
So unless there is a way to override that and simply do what Backburner does, which is to open the scene and render it, then I am stumped.

[fixeighted]

This looks like a 'similar' issue and one that has no solution as yet, if I read it correctly https://forums.thinkboxsoftware.com/...assets/14043/2

If that is the case then it is of course ridiculous that it works like this.

[^Lele^]

While on some other task, i took the time to benchmark the loading times of four 8k Tiff textures, versus their .TX counterparts.
This was done opening and closing the compact material editor, populated with shaders, ensuring that the files were reloaded each time (i.e. not cached.).
The time not spent loading the files was measured opening and closing the matEditor when the maps were loaded (the slack will include both the UI redraw, and the rendering of the samples proper.).

All files were loaded off an SSD with no other process accessing it (variations are due to the first cpu core being hammered, ofc.), so in a way they make .Tx look worse than it is, as the tiff files load as quickly as they possibly can (unlike, f.e., in production.).
Still, the .tx files are about *five times* quicker to load, and the speed is maintained for all and any material editor interaction (tiff: sluggish; .tx: lightning quick.).