Rendering Solaris Vray on a farm

[ronald_a]

Hi,

I am starting to look into Solaris/Vray more seriously and am wondering how people submit stuff to a farm. We are using deadline so any deadline hints would be great. I've been trying to get stuff to work through pdg but had no luck so far. I would also be interested in other solutions and get to know how people do that.

[GoodbyeKansas]

We got our own farm dispatching code that generates the commands. But I have heard about people that have got it going with Deadline so it should be doable.

-- Erik

[ad_rietvelt]

nvm found in another thread.

[ronald_a]

GoodbyeKansas I see, that makes sense for a company your size. So are you saying that you have custom stuff for the submission or is your complete renderfarm management custom (so no off the shelf stuff like tractor or hquery).

[stehrani3d]

We use Maya/V-Ray/Deadline at work so I don't know much about proper rendering setups through PDG, but your thread prompted me to give PDG/Solaris/V-Ray/Deadline submission a try. I have a basic setup with a couple of ROP Fetch TOPs working, essentially just using the default settings on the Deadline Scheduler using the Submit As Job method. The only thing I had to change was setting the Python path under the Job Parms: \$HFS\bin\python

One thing to note: If you are using only one machine to do all your testing you will want to launch a second worker to pick up actual rendering tasks that spawn. The Deadline documentation covers how to set up a second worker.
I am attaching a simple Houdini scene (Houdini 19.5.493, V-Ray 6.00.21)

With Deadline there are lots of places where things can go wrong or be misconfigured but I hope that helps a bit.

[ronald_a]

stehrani3d thanks for the example. I have something similar (already in an hda) working here. The issue right now with pdg is that you either have to have a worker machine that creates the actual rendering job (like in your example) which needs an engine license or you need to keep your current houdini session running (which is also not optimal). Also, with all the pdg/deadline/monitoring stuff going on (which is somewhat unnecessary), I find that husk takes pretty long to launch which in some cases (where single frame don't actually render very long) makes rendering pretty inefficient.

What is Gosho.Genchev saying about this topic?

[Gosho.Genchev]

Hey ronald_a ,

I don't have much to contribute to this topic - we are hoping either SideFX, or the 3rd party render management developers would step up and provide solutions for artists. The last time we implemented custom support for Deadline, this ended up consuming an unreasonable amount of developer time - it is unlikely we will do this again.

Also, with all the pdg/deadline/monitoring stuff going on (which is somewhat unnecessary), I find that husk takes pretty long to launch which in some cases (where single frame don't actually render very long) makes rendering pretty inefficient.

I've noticed the same when simply calling husk through a subprocess with Python on Windows - it seems to take a while to start up.

Best regards!

[ronald_a]

Gosho.Genchev Well that was my hope as well, but after deadline going free, I'm not really expecting to happen much there. Technically SideFX has a solution, it's just not very practical. Not sure about the other developers (tractor coming to mind here). Still I find it strange that after a couple of years of Solaris, there is no off-the-shelf sollution for this. Is every Solaris/Vray (or also any other renderer) client running a custom solution?

Talking about Husk: wasn't /isn't there the plan to make vray render usd directly (instead of vrscene)?

[Gosho.Genchev]

I would assume the main reason is that USD is a collaboration tool intended for teams of artists. As such, there isn't much there yet in terms of making the lives of individual artists easier.

Talking about Husk: wasn't /isn't there the plan to make vray render usd directly (instead of vrscene)?

Yes. It's getting fairly close to fully featured, too. Right now this is only available in V-Ray for Maya. You won't get the slower startup with husk this way but I wonder how that would solve the submissions issue for you, though?

Best regards!

[ronald_a]

Gosho.Genchev Well, I imagine, that the vray render rop could be modified in a way so that instead of rendering whatever is set in OBJ context it has the option to input a (render-)usd file. With that, it could still export out the vrscene file which just references the usd file and so could use any existing workflow. This could then be even hda's into a nice little LOP node. But that's just off the top of my head, I might miss something rather important.

Fact is, as long as we don't have a similar workflow as with standard houdini/rops/deadline, solaris/lops is somewhat of a "would like, but can't do" for us.

Oh, I would also like to know if glacierise can share how they are doing it.

[bdancer]

Our goal of course is to match Solaris/Hydra and native USD loader results , but I'm not sure it's good approach to mix vrscene with USD in such a way.
What's the issue with using husk at the render farm?

[ronald_a]

Our goal of course is to match Solaris/Hydra and native USD loader results , but I'm not sure it's good approach to mix vrscene with USD in such a way.

I am not proposing mixing vrscene with USD but rather using vrscene as a container/wrapper to load a USD file simply for rendering (so no vrscene files that load other vrscene files etc.). So this would be like a mode for the vray rop: It's either set to "normal" which is what it does right now OR(!) USD load mode. Both ways, you will get a vrscene file. In case of USD load mode it just has the reference to a single USD file.

What's the issue with using husk at the render farm?

To my knowledge the only way (without writing custom code) to submit husk from within houdini is through PDG. PDG then does a lot of things deadline could actually do, so it creates this weird obsolete functionality. Also when going the PDG route, you either have to keep your houdini session open for the job to continue (I said its weird) or it creates a special deadline job which launches hython to do the same thing but then uses an engine license (which contradicts the whole husk concept). Also loading husk and vray (especially through the PDG deadline plugin) for every single frame becomes pretty unefficient in some situation.

[glacierise]

Our developer Mois extended the deadline submitter to support Husk, I guess we can share the code. There were some bugs left to fix

[ronald_a]

glacierise Oh wow, that would be amazing!

[bdancer]

> I am not proposing mixing vrscene with USD but rather using vrscene as a container/wrapper to load a USD file simply for rendering

Again I don't follow why to wrap into the vrscene file...
V-Ray Standalone could accept .usd files instead of .vrscene files, but it's still work in progress and not yet ready for production.