Vray Texture Bake with DR Submission to Thinkbox Deadline

[Robert1977]

Dear all,

I know this might not be the right forum for the request, but since my experience was that this forum here is the one with the most knowledge and responsiveness, I will try to post it here.

I have successfully updated our own pipeline scripts to support the new “Bake to texture” Feature within 3dsmax, formerly it was “Render to texture”. What I am failing at is to submit the bake job optionally with Distributed Rendering. I mean I can set the flag and the servers start to calculate together the prepass, but when rendering the final image, they go off and restart, never finishing the rendering.
Did anybody have the same issue?
I submit a script-job for texturebaking, and i manipulate the amount of frames to let for example 5 slaves join the task, as I am used to do it for rendering large images.

Here are some excerpts of the code:
SMTDSettings.DBR = true
SMTDSettings.DBRServers = 5
SMTDSettings.DBRUse3dsCmd = false
SMTDSettings.ForceWorkstationMode = false
SMTDSettings.UseSilentMode = false

SMTDSettings.SubmitAsMXSJob = true
SMTDSettings.isBakeJob = true
SMTDSettings.BakeJobOneObjectPerTask = true
SMTD_objsToBake = #(…)

Also I use these settings, but they do not have an effect:
SMTDSettings.UseCustomFrameList = true
SMTDSettings.CustomFrameList = #(0,1,2,3,4)

Directly in the Submitinfofile i then manipulated the frameslist, since it doesn’t update through the above settings, here i takes as many frames as i want farm slaves together with master to join the job:
Frames=0,1,2,3,4

[Robert1977]

Dear Chaosgroup team, just a question, is it at all possible, to bake textures with the new scripts/UI in 3dsmax (Bake to texture instead of render to texture) in Distributed Render Mode?

I mean the following:
Baking with the new Baketexture instead of the old Rendertotexture
Submitting the job as Maxscriptjob, not as 3dsmaxcommand-Job to deadline with own submission script, so that the number of frames = the number of master and slaves. Master gets the scene and distributes it to the slaves, as it works for rendering stills.
I got this to work until the gi was calculated by the slave(s), but as soon as the slaves start to render the beauty-pass, the 3dsmax-instance on the slaves restarts.
Master is set to not render, just to distribute, hosts are not saved in the scene.
Master is not in workstation mode either.

Probably I need to check the logfiles on the slaves in the moment when the vrayspawner restarts the 3dsmax-instance.
Doing it locally works, I mean when I start the scene on my local PC and submit a vrayspawner-job to the farm to reserve explicitely some servers, then they render correctly in distributed mode the texture to bake.

[hermit.crab]

Dear Chaosgroup team, just a question, is it at all possible, to bake textures with the new scripts/UI in 3dsmax (Bake to texture instead of render to texture) in Distributed Render Mode?

Yes, it is. Just tested it and it works fine.

Probably I need to check the logfiles on the slaves in the moment when the vrayspawner restarts the 3dsmax-instance.

I guess your script does send the Bake to Texture job properly and indeed you should check the logs.

Doing it locally works, I mean when I start the scene on my local PC and submit a vrayspawner-job to the farm to reserve explicitely some servers, then they render correctly in distributed mode the texture to bake.

So, you're saying that it works fine if you are not using Deadline? If so, it seems there must be something else to set up in Deadline. I suggest you write in the Thinkbox forums, since there they will certainly know more. Otherwise, I've found this, however, I can't seem to make it work for f.e. 3ds Max 2024 and can't find any more info if it is supported or not.

[Robert1977]

Hey, thanks for the answer.
The link you send points to the workflow submitter script Deadline team wrote to support the new Bake-To-texture feature (instead of render to texture) as deadline-job. I use also Bake-to-texture (with own script submission) and submission seems to works well in the beginning. On deadline, it is a maxscriptjob. If sent without distributed flag, then it works fine on the farm, texture will be baked. One master opens the scene and renders the texture fine, completes and closes. Issues are only when doing distributed. The workflow script that you send the link to doesn't have the option for distributed either, but this doesnt mean that it shouldnt work if submit properly, i would say.
Yes I need to check the logs probably.
Also when doing bake to texture locally with having send a distributed job to the farm (reserves the slaves for my local machine), then it works as well.
Just think it has something to do with sending it in the way to the farm, that the master gets frame 0 and slaves frames 1-n. They might not "understand", that they bake a texture, not doing a rendering, so they restart when entering the beauty pass. But this might be a wrong conclusion. Also GI is not a problem I think, i checked with and without saving and using it. when gi switched off, i have the same issue. Yes, probably i need to check the Deadline forum.
Thanks.