I wanted to find out if there’s a way to split a Draft job to be processed on multiple render nodes. I have a Draft job that does a batch of about 50 slates, but since it all renders on one node, it takes hours to finish. I could submit 50 different jobs and it would take about 5 minutes, but it’s not ideal since it’d spam the the Jobs Panel. It would be much nicer to see one job with a Task Progress that’s x/50.
Which version of Deadline are you using? At some point (I believe it was for DL 6.0), I made some tweaks to the Draft plugin to make this possible.
If you are on 6.0, the first thing you need to do is make sure your Draft script uses the ‘taskStartFrame’ and ‘taskEndFrame’ arguments, instead of ‘startFrame’ and ‘endFrame’ (or else each slave will just end up doing the whole thing).
Once you’ve done that, you should theoretically be able to right-click your job and select ‘Modify Frame Range’ to change the number of Frames per task. You should also remove the Machine Limit of 1, which can be done through the Job’s Properties dialog.
Hope this helps!
- Jon
I am using Deadline 6 and this worked! Thank you!