Distributed Rendering with Deadline broken

[TheScope]

Hi,
after upgrading to VRay 3.6 I noticed one bug when trying to submit a VRay DBR job from within Maya. The Deadline script does correctly reserve servers on the farm but the list of servers in "Render settings" -> "Settings" -> "Distributed rendering" -> "Settings..." is not populated with the reserved servers. No error message is given.

It works as advertised with VRay 3.5204.

Did anything change in 3.6 regarding distributed rendering?
I already raised the issue with the Deadline support since it is probably a Deadline bug. You can find the forum thread here: https://forums.thinkboxsoftware.com/...p?f=11&t=15606

Maya 2017 Update 4
VRay 3.60.0.1
Deadline 9.0.6.1
Windows 10

Cheers, Florian

[shaio]

Hi,
Thanks for the feedback. I'll try it on my end and check if there is something wrong. I'll get back to you as soon as I have some more information.

[shaio]

Did anything change in 3.6 regarding distributed rendering?

Yes we did make some changes in the files that the DR servers settings are kept. The major one is that we store the information for the DR servers only in one file "vray_dr_list.xml" (located in the maya settings directory) instead of four files like it was before. It is very possible that deadline writes the new servers in the old files and they're not populated in the Distributed render settings since VRay reads the servers from the new config file where they don't actually exist. I'll keep looking and will get back to you when I have more information and a possible workaround if the problem is in those files.

[shaio]

Unfortunately there is no workaround for this. I'll write a support message to Thinkbox about our changes so they could fix them on their side. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[selavfx]

Does anyone know if this is fixed and if so do we need to update to the latest Deadline Version?

[TheScope]

It?s not fixed in the latest Deadline version. Here is the relevant thread on the Deadline Forum.

[Morbid Angel]

I never use that option in deadline. Instead I just run a command line to start maya vray dr, then submit a job to my workstation (in deadline) once that's done your workstation (it can be any system really) runs the scene with the dr list it had when you were working and renders that way. Of course its a bit of a manual process to start / stop dr, but its hopefully a workaround for now.