Deadline problems when using DR

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Hello guys,
i am having shitloads of issues trying to setup Deadline in our office.
I managed to get animations run but for the love of God, i CANNOT setup the DR.

I need the DR to be working in two modes:
1. local rendering using DR when working on the scenes to speed up the work
2. batch rendering static images on our farm where the stills are send through Deadline and rendered with the help of DR

NOW

Deadline has some sort of its own way working with spawners - they cant run on the background but this goes directly opposite the workflow when i need the DR to run on specific local workstation and i need those spawners running.

i ve been trying to make this work but no success for 5 hours alread and i feel like my brain is going to explode.

Can someone please help?

THANKS!
M

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

I ve managed to get the local DR session running

BUT

When i submit the job to Deadline monitor with DR on, the slaves dont get picked up once the render starts...only the master renders

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

my further inspection shows that when a DR job is submited, the Deadline slaves are starting various counts of spawners which keep popping up and down in the system tray.
I ve seen as much as 7 spawner instances but still the job doesnt get picked up at all by the slaves, only by the master.

[ivan.slavchev]

If you use Deadline with DR you have to start the spawners from Deadline (V-Ray Spawner job), not manually or as a service. Also - "V-Ray DBR and Mental Ray satellite" option should be enabled.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Hello Ivan,
thanks for help but how did you manage to get this dialog to appear?
I have "Submit Max to Deadline" and "Submit Vray DBR to Deadline" in my tabs only and the dialog boxes dont look like that.
I am using Deadline 10.

[ivan.slavchev]

I use Deadline 10 too, this submission menu is from inside Deadline Monitor->Submit->3D->3dsMax. It's possible that the UI differs a bit in minor versions.
The same thing can be accessed from inside 3dsMax if you've installed the integrated Deadline submission. The option will be grayed out, however, if Distributed rendering is not enabled from Render settings.
You can also submit only to 1 slave in Deadline and it will start a DR job to the machines that are added in V-Ray's Distributed rendering settings. That way you'll use Deadline to schedule jobs, but the redistribution of the frames between the slave machines will be carried out by the DR algorithm. If you submit like that you won't need "V-Ray/mental ray DBR" option enabled, but the DR slaves still have to be started Deadline (V-Ray Spawner job).

Generally speaking - render managers and V-Ray Distributed Rendering work in a different way regarding job distribution. This is because a Render manager distributes jobs frame by frame - for example Node 1 receives frame 1, Node2 receives frame 2 etc.

Distributed Rendering (by design) distributes EVERY frame between all nodes. This is achieved by dividing the frame to pieces (called "Buckets") that are distributed to the different nodes, rendered, and after that compiled into the ready image ( https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY4MAX/Set+Up+Distributed+Rendering ). For example - if you have 6 render nodes Node1 will receive 1/6 of the frame's buckets, Node 2 will receive another 1/6 and so on. That way Frame 1 is rendered by all 6 render nodes, after that frame 2 is also rendered by all nodes etc.

As you can see - if you try to render by simultaneously using DR and a RM with all nodes there will be a problem in rendering, because:
1. Every Render Slave receives a whole different frame to render from a RM

but also

2. Every Render Slave receives Buckets (or pieces) from every frame one by one from Distributed Rendering's algorithm, including the frames already received from the RM

The result will be mismatch and problems in rendering. That's why Deadline has "V-Ray DBR" an algorithm built in to prevent this mismatch. I don't think other render managers have a similar thing.

A way to work around this without using "V-Ray/mental ray DBR" will be to configure DR on your workstation the way you want and add ONLY the main workstation in the RM. That way you can schedule jobs in Deadline, they will be submitted correctly to the workstation Frame by Frame and since your main workstation is the only node all frames will go there. The workstation will then redistribute the frames using DR. When you use Deadline - the DR slaves still have to be started Deadline (V-Ray Spawner job) if you want to do that.
It's also important to note in that case that if "Safe servers in the scene" option is not enabled in V-Ray's DR settings, V-Ray on the chosen slave will use the DR slave computers listed in it's DR settings file - "%localappdata%\Autodesk\3dsMax\201x8 - 64bit\ENU\en-US\plugcfg\vray_dr.cfg"

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Thank you for this Ivan, i really appreciate it!
Perhaps this will be a very useful info for some, but i give up on Deadline.
I tried all you suggested but no go :-/

I would never expected that such a praised render management system would give me such hell when trying to making it work. Two days lost and all the toggles and checkboxes just make it frustrating to work with. Not to mention the local DR session is so laggy.

I am done with it for good and i will be happily awaiting the render manager from Pulze instead.

Thanks a lot again!
M

[ILS]

Just to add my two cents to the topic.
I was never able to get vray DR jobs working on a farm through the Deadline max submitter either.
I ended up writing my own script for submitting those jobs which involved submitting a DR spawner job first then the max job with a pre-render python script to check for the spawner job and then also another python post render script to end the previously launched DR spawner jobs. Plus to get it all to work, the max job needed to be submitted in a workstation mode, that is submitted to machine with a max license. So to make a long story short; kind of not worth the hassle.

Perhaps it is better to use Deadline submitter's jigsaw multi-region render tool and just submit parts of the image to each machine. If divided evenly and submitted to fairly equal machines the result should be similar to DR.

While Deadline is far from perfect, but it is way better than anything out there right now in terms of documentation, support, and user base. We use it pretty much for everything, from rendering stills, animations, compositing, transcoding footage and distributing software installation. This is definitely a production studio tool, and learning it will take some time. I would not give up on it after just two days. Did you talk to the guys at thinkbox/amazon, their forum is very responsive and helpful?

[Oleg_Budeanu]

It is actually not that hard to set up. There are 2 modes of the DR setup - DBR and Offload. Offload is being used for local DR job. DBR is being used when you are sending the job in the queue.
I suggest you to address Deadline support - they are very responsive and super helpful with such things, they will definitely explain you how to set that up.
Cheers