Dear Pro-Deadliners,
we need help setting up AWS Deadline Cloud with a service-managed fleet (SMF).
Is here a good place to ask technical questions? We tried AWS support with a business plan but didn’t get a response on this yet.
We haven’t used Deadline before - started with setting up a working on-premises test, only to learn that AWS Deadline Cloud is something else. 
The submitted scenes will be for Houdini 20.0 and Redshift v2025.0.2.
As those are not available in the “deadline-cloud” Conda channel, we followed the developer guide, created our own channel on S3 and started building Linux application packages.
Our Houdini package build was successful and we are able to render scenes with correct outputs from the Mantra renderer.
Our Redshift renderer package is also building but we need help with the following:
-
Loading Redshift with Houdini via environment variables:
We are setting PATH and HOUDINI_PATH in the Redshift package’s activate script. But Houdini reports all Redshift node types as unknown. Is some prefix required for Conda to set the variables correctly? -
Assigning worker instances with GPUs:
When editing the queue’s allowed instance types via the dashboard, there are no g5 types available. Are we missing specific quota for this? -
Accessing the usage-based licensing server:
It works for Houdini in the SMF but we’re not sure if Redshift will be available? -
Submitting from Houdini with DeadlineCloudSubmitter ROP:
What is the recommended workflow for adding plugins like Redshift to the packages list? Should we have a dedicated Houdini+Redshift queue with good defaults? We’re already adding our S3 channel as a queue default parameter.
We can see that the “deadline-cloud-for-houdini” GitHub repository has upcoming support for Houdini 20.0 and 20.5 on the mainline, is there an estimated release date for houdini=20.0.* (or higher) Conda packages in “deadline-cloud” and maybe even off-the-shelf renderer plugins like redshift-2025.0.2?
It would be great if we could see example Conda build recipes for houdini, houdini-openjd and also a houdini-redshift etc. to understand where we may be missing something.
As we’re currently kind of stuck with SMF, we also went down the alternative path of creating a customer-managed fleed (CMF). Created a Debian AMI on g5.8xlarge with Houdini and Redshift installed, added the worker agent and houdini-openjd etc., got auto-scaling to work with the custom image and even connected a usage-based licenses endpoint.
But that doesn’t seem to include Redshift.
And we have no idea when/how to execute Houdini’s “hserver” command to set the license server and to set the Redshift license environment variable, with the AMI already built. Would we modify the Houdini job submission template code for that?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance for any insights or suggestions, and best regards,
Michael
