What’s New In Deadline 7.2.0.7 (Beta 1)
Deadline 7.2 adds new features and new application support, and fixes some bugs.
Note that a new 7.2 license is required to run this version. If you have a license for Deadline 7.1 or earlier, you will need an updated license. In addition, the version of Draft that ships with Deadline 7.2 needs a new 1.3 license. If you have a license for Draft 1.2 or earlier, you will need an updated license.
New “Quick Draft” Options Added to Most Submitters
New Draft options have been added to most of the job submitters that allow you to easily create movies from your rendered images or perform file conversions, without having to create a Draft template script. Instead, a generic Draft template that ships with Deadline is now used, and it lets you specify settings like Output Type, Codec, Resolution, and Frame Rate.
GPU Affinity Settings for Slaves
GPU affinity can now be set for Slaves, in the same way that CPU affinity can be set. These GPU affinity settings can be used by Deadline’s application plugins to set the GPUs to use for the render if the job’s renderer supports it. Currently, the GPU affinity settings are only used by the Maya and Softimage plugins when the RedShift renderer is being used.
For example, if you have two Slaves running on a machine with 4 GPUs, you could set their affinity so that one Slave uses GPUs 0 and 1, and the other Slave uses GPUs 2 and 3. When these Slaves render RedShift jobs, they will pass the GPUs they want to use to RedShift so that each render only uses 2 GPUs.
Smarter Task Error Handling
An option has been added to the Failure Detection section of the Job Settings in the Repository Options that allows the slave to pick the next available task for a job if the job’s previous task generated an error. This allows the slave to try other tasks for the job after an error instead of repeatedly failing to render the same one. Note that this option is disabled by default.
New Application Support
Support has been added for After Effects CC 2015, DJV 1.1, Guerilla Render, modo 901, TVPaint, and VRay for Sketchup.
General Improvements
- Improved how sticky settings are passed to the Shotgun and ftrack windows when they are launched from submission scripts.
- The Slave options to exclude them from the “none” pool or group has now been moved to the Repository Options, instead of being a per-Slave setting.
- Updated all submitters that support Tile and Jigsaw rendering so that they no longer try to submit a Tile job if the tile count is greater than the job task limit in Deadline.
- Updated Jigsaw to add a main menu and hotkeys.
Job Improvements
- Added a Repository Option to have a slave pick the next available task for a job if the job’s previous task generated an error.
- A job no longer fails to submit if an empty Username value is set in the job info file. Instead, the current Deadline user on the machine is used.
- Deadline now supports Guerilla’s frame list formatting style. For example, frames 1 to 10 can be specified as 1:10, and a frame step of 2 can be specified as 1:10:2.
- Bitness checking when rendering is now only performed on Windows because Deadline only runs on 64 bit versions of Linux and Mac OSX.
- The Pending job scan operation now prints the names and ids of the jobs it scans.
- When deleting jobs, the counts for the jobs in each state are now shown again.
- When undeleting a job, the job’s whilelist/blacklist is now properly restored.
Launcher Improvements
- When showing a popup message notification, the job’s user and the machine that sent the message are now shown.
- On Linux and Mac OSX, the Monitor is no longer launched through the existing Launcher if it’s running as a daemon. This way, the Monitor runs as the current user, not the user that the Launcher daemon is running as.
- Fixed the warning message when Remote Control is disabled to refer to the Client Setup section of the Repository Options, instead of the Client Settings section.
Monitor Improvements
- Added Monitor Option to configure the number of entries that are saved in the Search Box history.
- Added option to view job history for deleted jobs in the Undelete Jobs dialog.
- When adding a new Cloud instance, only the enabled Regions are shown, and a popup message will be displayed if no Regions are enabled.
- The Perform Balancing action option in the context menu is now disabled if more than one Balancer is selected.
- A warning message is now shown when using Remote Control to tell a secondary Balancer to perform the balancing action.
- A warning message is now shown when using Remote Control to tell a secondary Pulse to perform housecleaning, repository repair, or a pending job scan.
- Multiple job selection when opening output directories now supported.
- Fixed a path separator bug that could prevent you from viewing the output path for a job that was submitted from a different operating system.
- Added a splitter to the Manage Pools and Manage Groups dialogs.
Slave Improvements
- Added Slave setting override the port used for remote communication.
- Slaves no longer cache the system memory when they start up in case the system supports dynamic memory adjustments.
- Added GPU affinity settings for the slave, which are currently only used by RedShift for Maya and Softimage.
Pulse Improvements
- Added Pulse setting to override the port used for remote communication.
Balancer Improvements
- The Balancer now only removes a Slave entry from Deadline once it has confirmed that its corresponding VM instance no longer exists.
- Secondary Balancers are no longer allowed to perform the balancing algorithm.
- Added Balancer settings to override the port used for remote communication.
Command Improvements
- Improved output messages for the commands that change the state of a job.
- The deadline command functions that change job states now displays which jobs had their states changed and which did not.
- Added GetJobTaskLimit command that gets the maximum number of tasks that can be created for a job.
- Fixed how job dependencies are printed to stdout when using commands that print out job properties.
- All commands are now creating history entries when they should be.
- Fixed typo in usage for SuspendJobNonRenderingTasks command.
Web Service Improvements
- Added JobTaskLimit command that gets the maximum number of tasks that can be created for a job.
- All REST API commands are now creating history entries when they should be.
- The REST commands for getting slaves in a pool or group now just return the list of slave names.
Scripting Improvements
- Added RepositoryUtils.GetJobTaskLimit() function that gets the maximum number of tasks that can be created for a job.
- Added JobTaskLimit class to standalone Python API that gets the maximum number of tasks that can be created for a job.
- All scripting functions are now creating history entries when they should be.
- Added RepositoryUtils.SavePowerManagementOptions() function to save power management options.
3ds Max
- Added VRay specific sanity checks to SMTD.
- Added save/restore local DR settings to both the Corona DR and VRay DBR submitters.
- Added ability to automatically disable the old 3dsMax ‘Net Render’ checkbox found in Max 2012 and earlier in the Corona DR and VRay DBR submitters.
- Fixed some bugs in how the VRay DBR slaves were being set in the VRay DBR submitter.
- We no longer try to backup or restore the VRay/VRayRT/MR *.cfg/max.rayhosts file if it doesn’t exist.
- We now expose the applicable VRay, VRay RT and Mental Ray Satellite configuration options at the 3dsmax plugin level.
- Updated 3dsMax “customise.ms” & “3dsmax.options” to support latest settings in VRay v3.2
- Added V-Ray DBR plugin config options to 3dsCmd plugin.
- Improved “Rendering” popup ignorer which can occur during off-load dbr on the master.
- Ported V-Ray DBR bug fixes from 3dsMax plugin to 3dsCmd plugin.
- Introduced .NET Orange Colour into SMTD_Palette for “warning” messages.
- Added ability to define Environment key/value pairs in SMTD (not currently exposed to the UI).
- Tile rendering no longer creates tile jobs if no output file is specified.
- Fixed an issue with Tile rendering and the Remove Padding submission option.
- Fixed some State Set issues.
- Fixed a bug where non-rooted external light-caching maps were being included in the job’s output directory settings.
- Verified that ActiveShade enabled Max scenes can be successfully submitted to Deadline. However, Lightning won’t support ActiveShade, so only MAXScript Jobs are supported.
- Added Sanity Check for ActiveShade enabled Max scenes.
- Resolves various padding and delimiter issues in output paths.
- Ftrack settings are now sticky per scene file (same as Shotgun).
- Shotgun properties CreateMovie and CreateFilmStrip are now sticky per scene file.
- Added support for VRay RT (#Production renderer) advanced MAXScript renderer properties.
- Added support for VRay VFB “resolution” override settings.
- Updated iRay specific properties that can be modified after the job is submitted.
- Updated Mental Ray specific properties that can be modified after the job is submitted.
After Effects Improvmements
- Added support for After Effects CC 2015.
- Added stdout handler to detect when After Effects tries to change the output format of a comp, and fail the render.
- Fixed a bug in the integrated submitter that could prevent it from properly accessing the Repository.
Anime Studio Improvements
- Added an option to use an experimental method for parsing Anime scene files that typically parses them faster then the old way.
DJV Improvements
- Added support for DJV 1.1.
Draft Improvements
- Added “Quick Draft” options to many job submitters.
- Updated the Draft Tile Assembler plugin icon.
- Fixed a regression when assembling multiple images in a specific folder.
Fusion Improvements
- Updated default render executable paths to include the new Blackmagic Design installation paths.
Guerilla Improvements
- Added support for Guerilla Render.
Hiero Improvements
- Added Draft support to the Hiero submitter.
Houdini Improvements
- Added Jigsaw support to Houdini.
- Added option to integrated submitter to export Arnold .ass files locally and then submit an Arnold standalone job.
- HQueue distributed simulation nodes can now be submitted to Deadline, and a job is created for each slice.
- Houdini node dependencies can now be respected when submitting multiple nodes to Deadline as separate jobs.
Maya Improvements
- Assembly jobs for tile or jigsaw jobs are now created properly for Mental Ray render passes.
- Added an option to select the GPU devices to render with when RedShift is the selected renderer.
modo Improvements
- Added support for modo 901.
Nuke Improvements
- Added Reload Plugin Between Tasks option to Nuke submitters.
- Updated Nuke submitter installer to properly set up the menu.py file, by removing any instances of our submitter from it and then adding the new submitter code.
Python Improvements
- Added option to Python job submitter to submit a script as a Maintenance Job.
Sketchup Improvements
- The Anti-Aliasing option is now in the correct category when modifying Sketchup job settings from the Monitor.
- VRay for Sketchup is now supported.
Softimage Improvements
- Added an option to select the GPU devices to render with when RedShift is the selected renderer.
TVPaint Improvements
- Added support for TVPaint 11.
VRay Standalone Improvements
- Added option to VRay plugin configuration to disable color progress in VRay’s stdout. Disabling VRay progress color can help prevent crashes in some newer versions of windows.
- Added VRay Standalone support to VRay Spawner plugin.
ftrack Improvements
- Updated ftrack event to be able to name the main component.
- Added ability to publish the scene file as a component for ftrack.
- Added ability to create/upload movie from draft to ftrack.
- Updated all monitor and integrated submitters that feature ftrack integration to be able to create/upload movies.
Shotgun Improvements
- Improved Shotgun event plugin to try not to pass super-long framestrings to Shotgun (which can result in errors, if it’s long enough).
- Updated Shotgun event plugin to to be able to handle Python style frame padding.