Having an issue with Phoenix simulations on Deadline.

[luxvfx]

Hello,

I have made a custom Phoenix to Deadline submission script and I am noticing that once the simulation finishes a single .iff frame gets rendered and saved to our network even though the scene is set to use VRay as the renderer and save out .exrs. I am by no means an expert when it comes to Deadline or scripting in general but I am basically passing the same command as the default Phoenix submitter: -preRender "phxfdBatchSim("PhoenixFDSimulator1");"

Can someone point me in the right direction on how to fix this behavior?

Let me know if there is any other information I can provide.

Thanks!

[georgi.zhekov]

Hello,

Does this happen if you submit the scene without Phoenix?

[luxvfx]

Hi Georgi,

I'm not sure what you mean? This only happens if I submit the scene to Deadline as a simulation job, if I submit it without Phoenix the job would fail as there wouldn't be anything to simulate. The single frame gets rendered after the simulation complete.

We have a separate script for submitting render jobs which is unrelated to this problem.

Hope that helps.

[georgi.zhekov]

Ah, I thought you're using the same job for both simulating and rendering.

If you wish to run only the simulation - you can run the following code

-r vray -preRender "phxfdBatchSim("PhoenixFDSimulator1")" -noRender phx_sim.ma

This will use V-Ray and will skip the rendering.

You can find more about the commands here - https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/PHX3MAYA/Scripting

Cheers,

[luxvfx]

Thanks for the Response. I did read through the docs and tried that command before posting here but the jobs kept failing. I'll give it another shot though as I'm probably doing something else wrong!

If I still can't get it to work I'll attach the .job and .info files.

Cheers!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Do you by any chance use any script under Phoenix -> Simulation rollout -> Script? I really can't think of another way Phoenix could force Maya into rendering - it has to come from the submission scripts or pre-/post- render callback scripts, or a Deadline setting...

Cheers!

[luxvfx]

Hi Svetlin,

No I don't use any script in the Simulation rollout. I've attached an image of the Deadline parameters but I have basically just copied what the default "Submit Simulation to Deadline" command was doing.

I have not yet retested the command that Georgi mentioned above but it did not work for me in the past. I will try that out as soon as I can.




Thanks!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hmm, just another 2 questions to help pin down the issue:
- If you submit the same scene using the default Phoenix submitter, is there still 1 .iff frame saved?
- If you create a new scene, create an empty simulator PhoenixFDSimulator1 and submit using your submitter, would there be an .iff frame written?

Cheers!

[luxvfx]

Hi Svetlin,

I will do these tests as soon as I can and let you know what I find.

Thanks!

[luxvfx]

Hello again,

I just tested the default Deadline submission (from the Phoenix FD menu) and it also writes out an .iff after the simulation completes.

Is there any other info I can provide to help troubleshoot this?

[luxvfx]

Well I've added the parameter "Renderer=vray" to the job file to force rendering with VRay which now respects the "Don't save image" option in the VRay settings.

This stops a single frame being written to the network, however, I still don't understand why a render is getting triggered after the simulation completes.

[georgi.zhekov]

Indeed - we need to fix our submission script I guess. Until then you can use the workflow shown here - https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...inkboxDeadline

Basically instead of a regular render job you need to specify to Deadline that this will be only a script job - this will only the script will be executed without the rendering. Hope this helps.

Cheers,

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, seems like a "script job" is the deadline job type that Phoenix should call in order for deadline not to decide to render a frame.

[luxvfx]

Thanks guys,

So just to clarify, even though the ScriptJob parameter is set to true (see attachment), the script has to be referenced from a file rather than using the CommandLineOptions parameter?

I've built my submission script to give the user a few options such as submitting multiple cascaded simulations to a single node in a specific order, or multiple sims to multiple nodes, which modifies the CommandLineOptions accordingly. So instead I would have to generate different script files for each of these scenarios?

I'm kind of learning as I go here, I don't have much experience doing this kind of stuff so thanks again for the help.

Cheers!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

I'm looking at this myself, since in our submission scripts this is also set to 1, and yet is seems like this can work only when also using ScriptFilename=%s, for non-rendering jobs. In case this turns out to be the only solution, generating a short file with the commands to run the simulators shouldn't be a very big task, but it's a bit of a dirty approach...