Can Vantage run in Windows virtual machine on Linux?

[jeremy_schwartz]

Hi --

Just trying to find out if Vantage can run in a Windows virtual machine on a Linux system (Ubuntu)? Using GPU passthrough support?

Thanks!

[npg]

We don't know. I'm quite skeptical because we use DXR which probably isn't supported even with emulation.

[jeremy_schwartz]

OK thank you for your response, that makes sense. We can run Vantage headless on a Windows server, correct? Are there any flags that need to be set? I did not see anything in the command line arguments related to running headless...
Thanks in advance!

[npg]

What exactly do you mean by "headless"? Only the viewport without UI? In any case Vantage is a DirectX app, so the server should be able to run such apps.

[jeremy_schwartz]

Hi npg --

By "headless" I mean running on a machine that does not have any connected display, so no viewport and no UI. I was basing my question on this comment:

1. Vantage does work in headless mode today via command line, and can be automated in a network rendering manner by a queue manager, so the likes of Deadline, etc. could support it if they wish.

[s.balabanov]

Hi Jeremy,

You can run Vantage on a machine without connected display. In the Vantage folder you will find a vantage_console.exe that can be run from the command line. When executing it, you can batch render different .vantage scenes, select which cameras to render from and set various settings. Vantage's GUI will be generated, but it shouldn't interfere with the rendering process in any way. When the render is complete, the GUI is closed automatically. Would that work for you? Actually, could you describe your use case, so we can guide you better?

Best regards,
Simeon

[jeremy_schwartz]

Hi Simeon --

Thank you for your response.

Our use case involves generating large photorealistic image datasets for training neural networks. We will be exporting scenes from our virtual world simulation platform, as a .vrscene file, which we then want to render in Vantage. The whole process needs to be automated, with no requirement for a user to access the Vantage GUI. I have used the vantage_console.exe wrapper successfully in Vantage 1.6.2, but for some reason after recently upgrading to 1.7.3 i am getting access denied errors (i should probably make a post about this in the Issues section also). Interestingly, I can run the regular vantage.exe from the command line with no problem, both in a shell and from Python using

subprocess.run()

.

Given that my development has been on a regular Windows system with display, i was just looking for some confirmation / reassurance that when this gets deployed on a Windows server without display, we won't run into issues where Vantage is unhappy about the lack of display. Having experienced various issues and setup headaches running headless on Linux systems, I wanted to make sure I was aware of any necessary setup to run Vantage headless successfully. Given what you say above, it sounds like we should be OK just running from the command line.

Thanks.

Jeremy

[npg]

We haven't changed vantage_console. We need more info about the error you're getting.

[jeremy_schwartz]

PS C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\Vantage> ./vantage_console.exe -h
Program 'vantage_console.exe' failed to run: Access is deniedAt line:1 char:1
+ ./vantage_console.exe -h
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.
At line:1 char:1
+ ./vantage_console.exe -h
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : ResourceUnavailable: (:) [], ApplicationFailedException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : NativeCommandFailed

If I do the same with vantage.exe, I get the help listing as expected. If this was a simple permissions issue, I would expect both executables to fail in the same way. Also, vantage_console.exe worked fine before I updated to 1.7.3.
I can try uninstalling and reinstalling....

[npg]

The exact same command works for me. There is no difference in how the two exes are installed. Maybe something happened on your machine, like some security software changing something, I don't know. Try installing the latest 1.7.4.