Saul Espinosa
patreon
Patreon Tutorial #56 - Houdini & Cinema 4D Deadline Setup - Part 2
🕑 Added 2024-11-04 18:30:02 +0000 UTCHey guys! This is part 2 of my Deadline tutorial series. In the second part, I will be going over the process of installing our Deadline plug-ins for both Cinema 4D and Houdini. I will also show you how you can modify the Deadline plug-ins to add support for newer versions of your DCCs that are not officially supported by the Deadline release using some text editing. This is an important thing to know due to how few Deadline updates are released throughout the year, many times there will be new versions of a DCC with no native Deadline support which means users have to manually edit plugins to support dispatching renders to Deadline.
I will also go over how we can debug any issues by checking the worker log error outputs. In this case, I do run into a problem due to Houdini attempting to use an invalid OpenFX plugin, and in this case, I how we can disable OpenFX entirely or only specific plugins. I also go over the optimal way to render with Redshift for linear scaling in a multi-GPU system by leveraging Deadline worker instances and the best way to submit tasks. Finally, I wrap things up by showing you the plug-in installation process for Cinema 4D, and how we can add support to Cinema 4D 2025 which is not currently supported in the latest Deadline release.
This tutorial is a bit on the technical side but I hope it helps demystify Deadline and get some of you guys using it for your workflow. Thanks again guys for all the support and have a wonderful week!
Comments
Paul Colton
Got it working across Mac and Windows, thanks for awesome tutorial! Have you tried getting it working on Houdini Solaris (with Redshift or Karma)? There doesn't seem to be an official Solaris plugin yet. Update: Super easy "hack" shown in this video to get it working in Solaris using Karma or Redshift: https://youtu.be/kNrW9SYuxkk?si=QJpiuX7iajIYGG3o
Saul Espinosa
You need to make sure projects exist on the network where both workers can see and use them. Each machine's "worker" settings have options to control what GPUs get used, by default all of them are selected. I discuss this in the GPU affinity section. So you would need to make sure the workers are up and running for each machine and detecting GPUs. Deadline Monitor will then see all the workers and their devices and distribute work to them. Regarding the licensing structure, In the case of submitting directly from Houdini, each machine would need an Hqueue installation and license available to them. It is usually easier to just use RS Proxies of entire scenes, put them on the network somewhere that all the machines can see, then run RS CLI through Deadline and that will submit the jobs to all the machines with a Redshift license/install. A lot less hassle than setting up Hqueue.
ian frederick
Hey Saul, thanks for these! This is great info. I have a question about using multiple separate machines. I have one machine with 2x 4090s (my primary) and another with 3x 3080s. Both local in my house. How can I use that second machine as well? Does that machine need to have houdini and redshift installed in order for it to work? Or can I just use those extra GPUs in deadline with Houdini + Redshift installed on my main PC? Additionally, how would I get deadline to detect those other GPUs that are not on my main computer where I am actually launching renders?
Saul Espinosa
I actually don't know what happened with Nimble Studio. So I cannot answer that.
Stelios Tatsis
Excellent Content!! Is it correct that Amazon Just Close Nimble Studio??
