Animation not rendering on some systems

[Otuama]

Hi all,

I'm posting a bit of my life story here for context.

------

I'm having a bit of a nightmare with a job. 

As far as I understand it's gone pretty smoothly - high res statics went to the client, every 25th tests were done for the animation.

Then, when trying to render it with our render manager it wouldn't render.

I then took over to fix the issue - Currently I wish I hadn't offered.

Sooooooo, I recreated the shots (all I really did was load the save and resave the scene) and they were rendering fine

However, they were taking too long to parse the scene.

Yesterday I spent most of the day optimising the scene

It then wouldn't render again

After a lot of testing (I was up until about 1am) I realised that it was one of the proxy trees

I turned them into a mesh, put a cube below it & attached it to the tree (this is what we've done in the past to fix dodgy objects (it seems to work))  - I then re-proxied and replaced.

IT WAS RENDERING - WHOOOOP

I left a system rendering the cache and went to bed.

This morning - 5 of the 9 systems are rendering the animation.

The others are giving this error - Does anyone know what the hell this means and what's going on?

15/03/2024 05:27:14: 15/03/2024 5:27:12 AM;  Error rendering frame 358: <string>:8: DeprecationWarning: the imp module is deprecated in favour of importlib and slated for removal in Python 3.12; see the module's documentation for alternative uses


Let me know if you need any more information but we're using Max 2024 - Corona 10 (hotfix 1) - We have no issues with animations normally so I don't see why the Max version & Corona

Thanks

[clemens_at]

had the exact same error yesterday when trying to render with backburner.

its very strange, we also could not get rid of it. what render manager are you using?

I tested with pulze render manager just to see if that changes anything and it rendered fine. One node had the error but still rendered normally.

[Otuama]

We're using RenderPal

Old I know - and no longer in business (so I just try to keep it alive).

It's really odd.

We haven't updated Max, Corona.... anything recently.

And we're always rendering animations so I can see no reason for it.

[pokoy]

I guess this is a problem on the max side of things rather than Corona, especially if both of you are on 2024 (at least one of you are) and there were changes to the Python version used that for some reason blows up. When you google for the error it's obvious it's some Python module that throws it. I'd report this to Autodesk...

[clemens_at]

it is definitely a max problem.

The thing is I have 3 machines with the same max2024 & corona setup but only 2 are throwing the error.
Guess it's time to find the difference...

[Otuama]

Thanks,

I've made a post on the Autodesk forum but it's been flagged as spam for some reason.

Annoying. 

There is this topic: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/3ds-max-forum/distutils-deprecation-warning/m-p/12156916#M208859

It seems to be an issue on startup - maybe a plugin issue (not sure if it's a Python plugin or a max script/plugin).

There's no reason this should suddenly be happening (FFS)

Thanks again

[clemens_at]

we finally found out what is causing this:

it's the connecter integration. You can now conveniently uninstall it directly from the connecter app.

After uninstalling everything works as expected. I already notified the guys over at dc.

[Otuama]

That's really interesting

How did you determine this?

Connecter 6 has been updating recently and I have had a 'successful integration' message on my system.

We'll likely be losing Connecter before August due to the free teams change (going to subscription)

It seems that the more advanced it gets, the more features, the more issues

[pokoy]

I'm not sure but 2023/2024 might have added an option to suppress warnings/errors on startup or scene loading to prevent problems like this one. You might find something in the Max docs - again, not sure but I seem to remember there was something done about this in one of the recent versions.

[clemens_at]

That's really interesting

How did you determine this?

Connecter 6 has been updating recently and I have had a 'successful integration' message on my system.

We'll likely be losing Connecter before August due to the free teams change (going to subscription)

It seems that the more advanced it gets, the more features, the more issues

well, I had one node that did not have any errors when rendering, so we just compared what was different to the other nodes.

The guys from dc already confirmed the issue btw, so we should have a fix soon hopefully. In the mean time you can just remove the integration from the machines with the error.

[Otuama]

When you say 'just remove the integration'.... Do you know how?

Short of uninstalling Connecter, I can't see how to remove the integration from Max

Any ideas?

Thanks

[romullus]

I didn't try this myself, but i think you can remove 3ds Max integration in Connecter itself - integrations>3ds Max integration installer>uninstall

[Otuama]

Perfect, that's worked on my system - will do the rest

[clemens_at]

jfyi, problem seems to be fixed with the latest integration.