Render managmnet - Deadline Tweet

[MISTER_SYD]

Hi everyone
I was wondering if anyone had any experience running deadline or another render management system with Octane.
We are a smallish design company and are slowly outgrowing the network render capabilities.

Having a render management system that supports octane would be massive for us.

We use C4D with octane and have 7 machines each with 4 GPU's with 2 more on the way.

any suggestions grateful... thanks you

[mrpinoux]

Following up!

[frankmci]

We are a similarly scaled company to the original poster, and we are using Deadline to manage C4D Octane renders in a mixed Mac/Windows/Linux environment. There's an issue that has made us use the the full C4D app instead of the intended C4D command line app; there seems to be an oddity in the C4D Octane plugin that requires elements of the GUI to load for it to render. We can work around that, since the full app responds to command line arguments the same way the designated command line app does, but it's slower to start a task and uses more machine resources.

Another frustration has been that there's no C4D command line flag for, "yes, just go ahead and overwrite the existing frames." If we want to re-render a sequence, we must first either delete the previous frames, set a new name for the new frames, or set a new destination directory. Otherwise, any slave machine that receives a re-render Deadline task pops up a, "do yo want to overwrite these files?" dialog window that prevents the task from beginning.

Octane/C4D/Deadline has been a bit of a pain compared to VRay/C4D/Maya/Deadline rendering, but so far it's been worth the hassle.

It's been a while since we got it set up, but I recall tat the headaches of C4D Octane rendering in Team Render on our network were even worse, so we've stuck with our old standby, Deadline.

The support folks over at Thinkbox/AWS have been very helpful, too. Just be sure to do your homework and get the basic, obvious troubleshooting out of the way yourself before you bother them with support issues.

[SUPERBIEN]

Hi There

We are using Deadline here too (repo version 10.0.23.4) with C4D R19.068 and Octane V4.02.1 / plugin R3 and I have to say that is not simple to setup. As far as I can list, here are the bugs we face out :
- for the moment Deadline doesn't support V4 standalone and there's no submitter integrated (so you have to save standalone scene then submit through Deadline monitor)
- Deadline do not handle C4D that well, specially when it comes to suspend slave in the middle of a task, and it's worst when you combine with Octane. C4D doesn't shutdown properly and the octane license is not unleash, the only way to recover the license is start/stop C4D gui way.
- if you submit from C4D you need a Octane/C4D plugin license for each render node. Keep this is mind if you planned to only buy standalone license for your farm. The fancy "Additional Render Slave Node License (also compatible with Deadline)" option sell in the Enterprise AA bundle will not be enough to render. The only way to use this additionnal render slave node will be octane daemon (again , not handle by Deadline like Vray spawner for example) or octane submission (see first point => V4 not supported, no in-soft submitter for octane standalone).

I think most of this issues are Deadline side. I don't know if Otoy helps them or not. Pretty odd that V4 still not supported for example.
So if you plan to use Deadline (which is pretty usefull by the way) piped with C4D/Octane just be sure to get enought plugin license and to not rely on the otoy floating license system (if it's always the same workstations that use the licenses you don't have to worry about this - just get enough plugin license).

I didn't benchmark Deadline VS Octane daemon (to avoid buying additionnal plugin license) for images sequence. I'm pretty sure Deadline wins. I should give a try to Deadline command line submission to run Octane daemon...
Another way would be to extend the export job possibility of the C4D submitter to Octane (only Redshift and Arnold supported yep).

TLDR
C4D/Octane => in-soft submitter => needs bundle license for slaves
C4D/Octane => export Octane scene => submit through Deadline monitor => needs only standalone license for slave. laborius pipe + not supported for V4 yet
C4D/Octane => submit command-line for Octane daemon => needs only standalone license for slave. not sure you need Deadline horsepower to do that

https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produ ... ma-4d.html
https://forums.thinkboxsoftware.com/t/c ... djob/24807