I realize that Combustion may not be a very widely used app anymore, but I use it and am wondering if there is a way to improve the submission via Deadline.
Ideally, I would like to submit from inside Combustion but I don’t think that’s possible. But there are a few issues when using Deadline to submit (as opposed to using BB from inside Combustion).
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When able to submit from inside Combustion via BB, you can give a render job name in the Combustion render settings. This job name stays with the Combustion file so you never have to give it a name again (and as you setup comps that will have similar names, you can edit the existing name pretty quick). Each time you go to submit, it already has it’s name. When submitting via Deadline, you have to fill in a name or copy/paste a name each time you want to submit. This is a real productivity killer considering there is a name already entered in the comp. Is there any way to make Deadline use the existing name in the comp?
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In the Combustion render settings, you set a frame range to render (for example frames 1-601). Deadline doesn’t respect the existing range and instead injects 0-600. I have to then edit the range to get it back to 1-601.
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Likewise, in Combustion render settings, you can set job priority.
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Likewise, in Combustion render settings, you can set the job to be suspended.
etc.
Again, the beauty is you set all these things one time in the setup of the comp and they are always injected when you choose to submit the job. So each time I must submit a Combustion job, all these items must be re-entered and it’s a time consuming step which is not there with BB.
Just wondering if there is any method that will fix/help these issues?
Thanks!
Hey Mike,
As far as we know, it’s not possible for us to create a submitter within Combustion.
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The Combustion scene file is ASCII, so we should be able to parse out the name and use it if it’s in the file. If you can send us a sample file, and let us know what name we should be looking for, we can determine if we can pull this from the file automatically.
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We are currently pulling this from the selected Output Operator. There is an “OutputInfo.Range” setting that we read from the file. Can you send us a sample file with the overridden frame range?
3/4. Because you are submitting from outside of Combustion, this would require us to inject stuff into the Combustion file. We’re hesitant to do this, but our submitter is just a python script, so you could edit it to do whatever you want.
Cheers,
Ryan,
Thanks for considering this. Attached is a zipfile containing a simple Combustion4 workspace, and two screengrabs showing the render job name as well as frame range, suspended, priority, etc.
I realize that some of these items were intended for rendering with BB… but if the data was there and they could be pulled for use within the Submit Combustion to Deadline dialog, it would make life a lot easier.
Essentially, all the user would have to do after entering the data one time in Combustion would be to click Submit Combustion to Deadline, choose the workspace and click Submit (Of course it would be nice to see the values populated in the Submit Combustion to Deadline dialog before clicking Submit).
Thanks again.
combustion4_to_deadline_stuff.zip (103 KB)
After examining the Combustion4 workspace in a text editor, the render job name, priority, suspended and frame range are there so I guess they should be able to be accessed?
The frame range is a little different as it’s listed as:
OutputInfo.Range 0 455 1
The desired range is 1-456 and is displayed like this in the app so I guess that means take the values 0 and 455 and add 1 to them to get the desired range? Or there is another line:
CompositeSettingsExt 1280 720 1 1 30 456
This seems to give the proper 1-456 values.
Thanks again.
Yeah, we should be able to pull that information easily and set the necessary settings in the submitter.
The frame range is a bit puzzling though. I checked another cws file we had on hand, and the CompositionSettingsExt line wasn’t defined for the output operator. It was defined under another operator instead. So I’m not sure if it’s a global override, or if it’s operator specific.
I also found this line in another cws file we have:
CompositionSettingsExt 720 486 1 0.9 29.97 135
So it would seem like the 3rd number is the start frame and the 6th is the end frame. Can you try adjusting the start/end frame on your end to confirm it’s the 3rd and 6th number we should be pulling from? Also, can you create a cws file with multiple output operators to see if more than one CompositionSettingsExt line appears in the cws file?
Thanks!
-Ryan
Ryan,
Attached is another CWS file where I changed the frame range to 25-399.
The CompostionSettingsExt line seems to be representing to total possible frame range 1-456… but not the render range.
In examining the CWS file, when doing a search for 399… it turns up nothing. But the data appears to be in the:
OutputInfo.Range 24 398 1
(Combustion has a preferences choice to have frames start with 1 instead of 0… I always work this way). So somehow it knows that it should number frames 25-399. There might be another line that is saying ‘start frames on 1’.
Thanks again.
combustion4_to_deadline_stuff_02.zip (12.1 KB)
Oh, and here’s a CWS where I duplicated the existing output and changed the range to 50-200.
There is only one CompositionSettingsExt line in the file.
And the Output2 has
OutputInfo.Range 49 199 1
Thanks!
Sorry… forgot to attach the file.
combustion4_to_deadline_stuff_03.zip (12.1 KB)
Alright, so it sounds like we want to avoid the CompositionSettingsExt line.
I’m not finding anything inside the scene file to indicate if the start frame is 1 or 0, so maybe what we need to do is add a checkbox to the submitter to indicate if the start frame is 1 or not. It would be a sticky setting so that it only needs to be set once, and then every cws file selected will take that into account when automatically setting the frame range.
Can you post a screen shot of that setting from within the combustion preferences? We will probably want to use identical wording so that Combustion uses know what it does in the Deadline submitter.
Here’s a screengrab of that setting in Combustion4.
Thanks! We’ve logged this as a feature request currently targeting 6.0. It should be very straightforward stuff, so we should have time to get it in there.
Cheers,
