Patreon Tutorial #56 - Houdini & Cinema 4D Deadline Setup - Part 1
Added 2024-11-04 18:00:11 +0000 UTCHey everyone, in part one of this tutorial, I will cover the base Deadline Repository and Client installation process. How do you source the installer files from AWS? The initial installation settings and options that you need to be aware of based on your particular system, this stage can confuse many people and if not set correctly will result in a non-functioning Deadline install. Most people at this point give up or get confused because Deadline doesn't connect correctly with the client and repository.
Once we have installed the Repository and Client I go over starting up Deadline Launcher to use Deadline Monitor for the first time and also creating our Deadline workers and worker instances. Along with general UI features layout and preferences. I will also show you how to submit Redshift Scene Proxies to the stand-alone Redshift Command-line rendering utility. After that I will go over the plugin system and begin our first steps into discussing plugin installation for different DCCs. In part 2 I will go over plugin installation in detail along with editing the plugins to support releases Deadline does not officially support.
This is a technical series, but an important one for users interested in batch rendering and adding Deadline to their workflows. Thanks again guys for all the support on Patreon, have a wonderful day!
Comments
Hey Ian, I mention below what "submit Houdini scene" means, but odds are you are trying to render a scene with relative references which the workers cannot access. So the relative references are dropped when using submit the houdini scene, and you need explicit references on disk somewhere for the workers to use. If you are working with multiple machines then this needs to be added to a location on the network. Honestly I find it much easier to just use RS Proxies of a full scene when rendering across multiple machines, as it also means you do not need multiple DCC licenses, only RS licenses. Check the link comment I posted to John Yim in the comments of this post.
Saul Espinosa
2024-11-21 18:41:01 +0000 UTCHey Saul, I followed your tutorials to the letter and I am still having trouble getting Deadline to render anything. I've got it installed, but when I launch a render, it just hangs on "queued" for a while before giving up and trying to move on to the next frame without actually rendering the first one. I just tried enabling "submit Houdini scene" before submitting, and now it's rendering some frames but those frames are missing the majority of the geometry in my scene and so they are unusable... what am I doing wrong?
ian frederick
2024-11-19 12:59:31 +0000 UTCChatGPT helped me figure it out. I can point the paths in C4DPlugins/C4DPluginBatch to my .bat file after all. Just need a %* at the end inside my batch file so Deadline can add arguments to it. Like "C:\Program Files\Maxon Cinema 4D 2025\Commandline.exe" %*
Mario Domingos
2024-11-15 16:05:03 +0000 UTCThanks a lot for this, Saul. It's been a great refresher since I last set up Deadline years ago. I'm currently having a couple of issues with Cinema 4D and was wondering if you could help. I'm using the Zero Install Zip Package. My Redshift installation is in a custom folder, and I usually point Cinema 4D to it via a batch file. This batch file sets up a few environment variables, including: set g_additionalModulePath=D:\Dropbox\_REDSHIFT_\RS_v2025.1.1 Then, it runs Cinema4D.exe. How can I achieve the same setup now that Deadline is running the executables? Is there a way in Deadline to configure those environment variables? I'll leave the second problem for later, as this one is more important.
Mario Domingos
2024-11-15 14:33:58 +0000 UTCI see, got it! Thank you so much for the detailed explanation!
John Yim
2024-11-14 18:58:03 +0000 UTCHey John, in that case, you must ensure in the Deadline Submission settings. (Where you set the frame range, or ROP used etc.) to also enable "Submit Houdini Scene" This will then send the entire scene to the Repo for all Workers to access. But this only works when not using relative paths. The assumption in this case is that you are using explicit paths on the network somewhere that all workers can access. https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/products/deadline/10.1/1_User%20Manual/manual/job-submitting.html "If this option is enabled, the scene or project file you want to render will be submitted with the job, and then copied locally to the Worker machine during rendering. The benefit to this is that you have a copy of the file in the state that it was in when it was submitted. However, if your scene or project file uses relative asset paths, enabling this option can cause the render to fail when the asset paths can’t be resolved. Note, only the Scene/Project File is submitted with the job and ALL external/asset files referenced by the Scene/Project File are still required by the Worker machines. If this option is disabled, the file needs to be in a shared location so that the Worker machines can find it when they go to render it directly. Leaving this option disabled is required if the file has references (footage, textures, caches, etc) that exist in a relative location. Note if you modify the original file, it will affect the render job."
Saul Espinosa
2024-11-14 18:53:12 +0000 UTCThanks for clarifying! I do wonder in a scenario where I have to work on a project with massive file caches (i.e. flip sim) where I already have a copy of identical file caches on all workstations' local drives (let's say I have machine A & B), when I submit the HIP file (which is stored on a local drive) from machine A does Deadline actually make a copy of the HIP file from machine A and save it to the network shared Repo for machine B to access?
John Yim
2024-11-12 05:43:02 +0000 UTCHey John, if you have the project files on a network location that all machines can access then it will use that, and then create a cache on each machine's local cache path. The default location for Redshift being C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Redshift\Cache. Once you start rendering, each machine will use the scene from the network path and generate a local cache to begin rendering. In theory, you could make each machine's cache exist on a network path for all of them to share, but generally speaking, this would have horrible performance because the cache I/O would be slower over the network.
Saul Espinosa
2024-11-11 20:29:28 +0000 UTCHey John, glad you liked the video. Deadline for sure can be a tricky thing to wrangle as it is confusing and there is little info out there. Great to hear this helped you out and resolved your issues. Thank you for the support!
Saul Espinosa
2024-11-11 20:25:06 +0000 UTCLong-time subscriber and this is by far the most helpful video you've made. I've been using Deadline for over 15 years and have always struggled with understanding and fixing issues on my own. This solved all of them and now I finally understand how and why. Thank you!
John Robson
2024-11-07 05:17:28 +0000 UTCThank you so much for making a Deadline tutorial, this is incredibly helpful! One question I have though about using Deadline with multiple machines on a local network - do I need to have identical project files on all the machines before submitting renders?
John Yim
2024-11-06 05:47:27 +0000 UTC
