I’d love to hear your experience on a topic of plugin distribution and version synchronization.
I see two ways of doing it:
local plugin directory
shared, centralized, plugin directory
What are your experience on this matter? Do you, at Prime Focus, use the first or the second approach?
I assume the second makes most sense and would be easiest to setup and maintain, however the first might be faster, less demanding on the network resources and always available, however, hard to maintain and update automatically.
So, if your’re using the first method, what would be the best way to have Deadline update our plugin folders?
I have a simple folder structure saved on the primary C:\ drive (by the way, we’re 100% on Windows here, Win 7 x64 for workstations and slaves adn Win 2008 x86 for the server), i.e.: C:\duber\max\plugins, so, how do I setup Deadline to source
the latest plugins from a network shared folder on the server \server\max\plugins\ and sync them with all the local machines running Deadline slaves?
Thanks a lot in advance for any tips and tricks on this subject, much appretiated, cheers,
A new feature that was introduced in Deadline 4.0 is the ability to create preload python scripts for each individual Deadline plugin. The idea was that this script would be executed prior to loading the plugin, and could do things like setup the environment or synchronize local folders. The documentation for creating these scripts can be found here: software.primefocusworld.com/sof … -_Optional
So based on your example, let’s assume you’re using the 3dsmax plugin. The first thing you would do is create a PreLoad.py file in \your\repository\plugins\3dsmax. The contents of this file might look something like this:
def __main__( *args ):
LogInfo( "Synchronizing local plugin folder" )
SynchronizeDirectories( "\\\\server\\max\\plugins\\", "C:\\duber\\max\\plugins\\", True ) #perform a deep copy synch
PS: We use a different synch method here at Prime Focus (it’s a proxy executable system that’s been in place for years and years), but it still uses a local plugin directory. Our old synch system has started to show its limitations though, which is why we developed this preload solution as something we could move towards in the future.
