Rendering GI Cache through Deadline

[AC5LT43R]

Hey guys,

We recently took on a project that involved using Terragen and I volunteered to take the responsibility of learning the program and getting to grips with it as nobody in a company of 50 very good VFX artists had used it before... and it's taken me a week to get stuck and ask for help, so here I am.

Anyway, I'm wanting to render out a GI cache but unsure how to go about it when doing it through deadline. Do I just submit the job as normal with "Write to GI cache file" enabled? and deadline will save it?

Thanks!

[chris_x422]

Hey

I do this a lot, though not with deadline, I've used tractor and royal render, but should be no different.

Just enable the write to GI cache file, and set the directory in terragen for the cache, and it will only produce the cache, not the full image.
I usually only render the GI for every third frame, (most render managers should give you the option) and use the interpolation when rendering the final output.

Hope that helps

Chris

[AC5LT43R]

Thanks Chris, it seems to be working so far

My next question is, although I specified inside Terragen a sequence step of 10, Deadline still renders frames 1-100 instead of every 10th frame. There's no option in the job submission to tell Deadline to skip every 10 frames. Is there a way around this?

[Oshyan]

Render Managers usually don't respect the "sequence step" in Terragen as they use their own methods to specify frame ranges (i.e. they're not reading the .TGD format, just calling Terragen with known commandline parameters). So the render manager itself needs to support alternate sequence step settings. I don't know whether Deadline has that feature, but I would think it does. Perhaps there is a Deadline help doc that can shed some light?

- Oshyan

[PabloMack]

You could possibly generate the GI cache files on one of your own machines and then submit the caches along with the other resources for the full render. Generating GI cache only takes a fraction of the time of the full render and, when you only use every 5th frame or so, it takes even less time. Sounds like, what I do, can't be handled with an off-site render service. I use one quad-core to generate the cache files ahead of the render farm which generates the images following behind. Even so, one quad core can easily outpace four octa-cores generating the GI cache files before they are needed. I guess, this kind of flexibility is a good reason to have your own render farm. But then I use Terragen a whole lot.