Hey guys
So my W10 Deadline setup with VHF works fine, just using the packages, but can`t get Linux Deadline + VFH to work at all.
I`m using packages there too , and render from Houdini works fine, but not from deadline. It seems that Vray plugin will not load correctly on the worker when rendering the task. My guess is that V-Rays enviroment variables(vfh_home, vray_appsdk etc) are not present/set?
What is the current situation with you and Deadline? Are u still not officially supported?
I tried to "Frankenstein " that job JobPreLoad.py script based off @Gosho.Genchev file but was not able to make it work, i`m not that good with python. @Gosho.Genchev do you have a linux version(in code IFs etc) of that file?
I also tried to set env vars manually system wide, with EXPORT, in bash etc, but that did not worked either.
Anyways, this is on Linux Mint 19, Deadline 10.1.4.1, worker running as root. Deadline + Houdini works normally for regular houdini geo/mantra etc jobs..
thank you
> It seems that Vray plugin will not load correctly on the worker when rendering the task.
> but that did not worked either.
What does that mean? What are the error messages?
Deadline is starting hython. What will happen if you’ll run hython manually on your Linux? Will you see VFH startup messages?
> I tried to "Frankenstein " that job JobPreLoad.py script based
The JobPreLoad.py is not needed anymore.
> What is the current situation with you and Deadline? Are u still not officially supported?
We have our own submission node + latest Deadline release has V-Ray job parameters as well.
@bdancer basically the error says node types are using incomplete asset definitions. here is log file.
log.txt.txt (28 KB)
Runing hython manually loads VHF correctly it seems
It hython works I’m not sure how could I help then; you need to figure out why your Deadline setup is different and fails to load the plugin…
In this thread - Chaos Forums I was suggesting setting HOUDINI_DSO_ERROR=2 this my help you debugging your setup
hm HOUDINI_DSO_ERROR=2, does not help with anything in my case.
I need to figure out what it wrong indeed ,and since my clean deadline+houdini works fine without V-Ray, i tough you might know something more.
Having vray present in the hip file will totaly mess up deadline. For example if there is material on sphere in the scene, and i try to save bgeo geometry of completly different object,lets say cube, deadline will error out like this.
> HOUDINI_DSO_ERROR=2, does not help with anything in my case.
It will not help, it’ll just print more information about failed loaded modules…
yeah. I will get in touch with Deadline guys, thx for you time.
If there are similar error like here - Chaos Forums this may help:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/hfs18.0/dsolib
Can you please revised that submitter you did, it`s just not working right. Explanation :
Task size is not applied correctly (dl_chunk_size). Usual deadline behaviour is one job item(left side), and task items/frames(right side). Your submitter now matter what you set will always have right side ONLY ONE TASK. That one task can be frame or range of frames, but it`s always ONE per JOB. You implemented this the wrong way around, This way it`s impossible to do concurrent tasks.
Can you make it behave like usual deadline submit? When i have frame range of 1-100, and want to render in chunks of 10 frames, aka 1-10,11-20 etc, i need to set frames per task to 10. That will result in ONLY ONE JOB, and 10 TASKS with range of 10 frames each. If i want to to concurrent on top of that i still can, my single machine will take 1-10,11-20 at the same time and render.
right now the way you have this, i just submit whatever, and then have to manually set it right from dealine monitor → Resubmit job.
hope it makes sense 
> Can you please revised that submitter you did, it`s just not working right.
We could.
You could use native Deadline submitter as well.
@psanitra we left two parameters under the export options:
Frames oer Job will split the submission into individual jobs - we left it so you can split the VRScene generation - no other way to handle this for now.
Frames per Task will split the rendered frames for each job into individual tasks.
Your submitter now matter what you set will always have right side ONLY ONE TASK. That one task can be frame or range of frames, but it`s always ONE per JOB. You implemented this the wrong way around, This way it`s impossible to do concurrent tasks.
Therefore, set Frames per Job to as many as the timeline length is. Maybe we should set it to $FEND - $FSTART by default ?
The simplest way to think about this - if you need to split the Houdini export job, use Frames per Job. If you need to tweak how many frames are rendered by a single task with the Standalone job, use Frames per Task..
Hope that helps!
Native does not work correctly with v-ray ROP. it will generate only one job, one task, and that task is the whole range.
@Gosho.Genchev you are missing what i`m trying to say. This is wrong implemented, you replacing tasks with jobs, therefor removing core Deadline functionality. Here are two images, rendering range 1-100 in 10 parts, what you are generating and what you should be generating. Your submission cannot do concurrent tasks.
Oh, OK, that is indeed the case. The Houdini jobs have a single task only. What you’re looking to do will work as expected (as in the right image) with the other 2 modes - we generate the VRScene in a single Houdini job with a single Task, then run a single V-Ray Standalone job with X number of tasks for rendering.
So … essentially we need to update the Render Job option to submit frames as tasks…we just didn’t think about this. The Houdini jobs are in a single task because of VRScene generation but when the mode is “Render Job” that can be substituted with individual tasks for each frame, in case the VRScene export on the Renderer ROP is disabled.
Alright then, thank you for being so patient with us.
Hi Peter,
We’re running the same setup, VFH and Deadline standalone, and it’s working great - did take some setup for us, we’re also doing deployment of Houdini and vray builds over deadline using salt, so overall it was some work, but it’s running smoothly now, several hundred jobs per day are going through smoothly. We’ll be making our pipeline open source soon, can’t wait to share it!
You could also try the thinkbox submitter that supports VRay now, that’s what we use, and we’ll be plugging in some event handlers to clean up the vrscene files soon.
Thanks
@psanitra , this should be taken care of starting with tomorrow’s builds. We’ve also defaulted the Frames per Job to $FSTART - $FEND - if for some reason you want more than one job, you’ll need to tweak this parameter. The Frames per Task does what you’d expect now.
Just to clarify:
1. When the Mode is “Render Job”, we do not export or submit any VRScenes. Once you’ve hit “Submit to Deadline”, the HIP file will be sent for rendering through Hython. The numbers of tasks for the deadline job will depend on “Frames Per Task”.
2. When the Mode is “Export Locally / Render Job”, the VRScenes are generated on the local machine based on the Frames per Job - if that is set to $FSTART-$FEND, there will be only 1 VRScene generated. Then, the VRscene is submitted as a V-Ray Standalone Job in Deadline - the numbers of tasks depends on the “Frames per Task” option, just as with (1).
3. When the Mode is “Export Job / Render Job”, the VRScenes are generated on the farm, through Hython - this is the ‘export’ job - it only has 1 task for the entire range. How many VRScenes are generated by the export job depends on the Frames per Job. Once you have the VRScenes, they are submitted as V-Ray Standalone Jobs. The number of Standalone jobs is the same as the number of export jobs but the number of tasks depends on Frames per Task. Therefore, you get per-task control over the rendering with V-Ray but there is no way to split the export job in separate tasks for each frame - you can only split the export to separate jobs. I hope that makes sense.
All the best!
@Gosho.Genchev Sounds good! thanks for looking into it.
