Tweet
I have a "dynamic" render farm set up across 100+ machines in 4 classrooms so that when nobody is logged in they can accept tasks and when someone logs in while it's rendering it will just stop the local backburner server service. This lets the render manager re-assign the task to another unoccupied node.
One thing I'm wrestling with is that when a student logs in and the task is interrupted, the node the task is re-assigned to will start from the beginning and re-render/overwrite any previously rendered frames. This means that the task size needs to be "guess-timated" so that it's mostly likely to complete without interruption. If a task would take ~4 hours to finish and someone logs in 3h45m in, then all that time was "wasted".
Is it possible to create a Backburner job in Maya using V-Ray as the renderer (set in the scene file and then "from the scene file" selected in the job creation dialog) in a way that will skip previously rendered frames? I've tried:
- Adding "-rep 1" and "-skipExistingFrames" (individually, not both in the same job) to the "Additional Options" field.
- Checking "Use Custom Command" then "Populate Command" and adding either "-rep 1" or "-skipExistingFrames" into the command line (and it was confusing to figure out where to put those flags)
In the "-skipExistingFrames" in the custom command scenario, every tasks fails immediately with "Error message: Cmdjob adapter: Process exit abnormally, Exit code is 206"
In the other 3 cases when the job starts every task it assigns comes back with "Error message: Cmdjob adapter: Process exit abnormally, Exit code is 204"
I believe Error 204 is Invalid Flag, and Error 206 is Missing File. I don't know what file might be missing in the latter case, though.
Is it possible to use V-Ray as the renderer for a Backburner-created job AND configure it to skip existing frames?
One thing I'm wrestling with is that when a student logs in and the task is interrupted, the node the task is re-assigned to will start from the beginning and re-render/overwrite any previously rendered frames. This means that the task size needs to be "guess-timated" so that it's mostly likely to complete without interruption. If a task would take ~4 hours to finish and someone logs in 3h45m in, then all that time was "wasted".
Is it possible to create a Backburner job in Maya using V-Ray as the renderer (set in the scene file and then "from the scene file" selected in the job creation dialog) in a way that will skip previously rendered frames? I've tried:
- Adding "-rep 1" and "-skipExistingFrames" (individually, not both in the same job) to the "Additional Options" field.
- Checking "Use Custom Command" then "Populate Command" and adding either "-rep 1" or "-skipExistingFrames" into the command line (and it was confusing to figure out where to put those flags)
In the "-skipExistingFrames" in the custom command scenario, every tasks fails immediately with "Error message: Cmdjob adapter: Process exit abnormally, Exit code is 206"
In the other 3 cases when the job starts every task it assigns comes back with "Error message: Cmdjob adapter: Process exit abnormally, Exit code is 204"
I believe Error 204 is Invalid Flag, and Error 206 is Missing File. I don't know what file might be missing in the latter case, though.
Is it possible to use V-Ray as the renderer for a Backburner-created job AND configure it to skip existing frames?
Comment