Can deadline select proper render pools based on software?

Deadline
1

the title says it all but let me clarify.

I’m using deadline for maya renders and I have a scene with a layer using the software renderer and a layer using mental ray renderer. Now certain render farm machines aren’t licensed to render mental ray but can render maya software so one group or pool will not allow the render to execute efficiently . I have used other render managers that look at what maya (or what software in general) is trying to render with and select the proper pool for that render layer. Can deadline do this?

I realize the work-around would be submit each layer as a separate render and quickly go into the monitor and change the pools for the appropriate renderers but that is an extra step and easy to be overlooked if you haven’t worked in the scene in a month or so.

Cheers

2

The problem is that Deadline’s pools or groups won’t always necessarily be used to indicate which software is available on which machine. Although the original intent of this feature was to allow you to submit all the jobs with the same properties, this is definitely a legit issue, and it would be nice to have a more general solution to the problem. For example, allowing the user to pick separate pools/groups/priority/etc for each layer prior to submitting the jobs. Does this sound like a good solution?

That being said, you could simply modify our submission script to handle this special case situation. If this is of interest to you, let us know and we can point you to the right spot to get you started.

Cheers,

  • Ryan