Distributed Rendering with Deadline 9.0

[coolhand78]

whilst awaiting approval on the deadline/thinkbox forums i'm just wondering if anyone here knows if you can submit a job to the render farm to distribute across all the computers but not have to run it locally on the workstation...?

as far as i can see when you submit a VRay DBR job with deadline you have to keep the file and dialog open on the workstation, i'd like to be able to just submit it to the farm and let it do it's thing and continue working on the workstation..

does that make sense?

[jironomo]

Yep you can definitely do that. Submit the job to deadline via the 'submit max to deadline' plugin from max. Then in the deadline settings box that pops up turn on Vray DBR. You can use the blacklist/whitelist or simply don't have the deadline slave running on your workstation.

You can then close the scene and continue working on whatever you want... and you should see the job pup up in your deadline monitor and any free slaves will start rendering the job.

[coolhand78]

Yep you can definitely do that. Submit the job to deadline via the 'submit max to deadline' plugin from max. Then in the deadline settings box that pops up turn on Vray DBR. You can use the blacklist/whitelist or simply don't have the deadline slave running on your workstation.

You can then close the scene and continue working on whatever you want... and you should see the job pup up in your deadline monitor and any free slaves will start rendering the job.

cool - thanks mate i'll check it out!

[duke2]

We're evaluating Deadline and are trying to do the same thing, but when we submit, the job just stays in the monitor and says its rendering but it's not. 3dsMax doesn't open on the main machine at all, and it opens but just stays there and does nothing on the slaves, taking up 0% CPU and ~800mb memory.

Did it work for you coolhand?

[coolhand78]

I haven't had much time to really test it but my initial tests failed... will have something to do with the ip set up in deadline and white and black list etc.
i need to pick a moment when nothing else is rendering and test it then. I'm confident it'll work i just need to work out exactly how to get it to do it...

[squeakybadger]

The VrayDBR integration is a bit iffy if you ask me. It works, but the Deadline system wasn't built for it and everything was a bit of a workaround to get it going.

We switched to tile rendering with Deadline, it is more fault tolerant for the number of jobs that are on the farm.

[duke2]

How does it deal with rendering IR and LC maps? I mean don't the tile borders show up? Also does it stitch up the render elements vray spits out?

[squeakybadger]

How does it deal with rendering IR and LC maps? I mean don't the tile borders show up? Also does it stitch up the render elements vray spits out?

Basically you have to script Deadline to send a precalc, a render job, and the tile assembly as a batch (that are all dependent on each other) otherwise you start to see brightness variations in the tiles. (I have a massive thread on the Thinkbox forums about getting it working)

It stitches all elements back together properly (even when using the vray raw image with embedded passes)

We now have a 1-click submission button to send everything to Deadline to render the image.

Going the tile route has basically eliminated 90% of render errors for us. If a render slave has a problem or crashes mid render, another slave will grab that tile and continue. No errors and no stuck buckets of doom!

[coolhand78]

Basically you have to script Deadline to send a precalc, a render job, and the tile assembly as a batch (that are all dependent on each other) otherwise you start to see brightness variations in the tiles. (I have a massive thread on the Thinkbox forums about getting it working)

It stitches all elements back together properly (even when using the vray raw image with embedded passes)

We now have a 1-click submission button to send everything to Deadline to render the image.

Going the tile route has basically eliminated 90% of render errors for us. If a render slave has a problem or crashes mid render, another slave will grab that tile and continue. No errors and no stuck buckets of doom!

is there somewhere we can get more info about this...
is the script available somewhere?

[squeakybadger]

is there somewhere we can get more info about this...
is the script available somewhere?

I've just sent you a pm with some info.

[duke2]

I'd love to know too!