HI
I was wondering if there is a way to render different Arnold standalone scene at the same time .
I know we can put the path of the kick location in the plugin , but how would deadline know which version of Arnold to pick ?
For example say we are submitting two standalone jobs from maya from two different shows that need to use different Arnold version,
would Deadline pick up the right kick as long as it is in the plugins path or would there be some manual labor to be done ?
Thank you in advance
Maurizio
Hi,
Currently, we allow for 2 x versions via the “Version=Release” or “Version=Beta” key=value entry in the submission file. Depending on how you would like it to work for your studio, you could add further entries here and allow users to select the version to be used. ALternatively, many studios use their own ‘wrapper’ scripts as part of their studio pipeline, which would feed the correct information either at submission time or automatically at render time via the Arnold plugin, driving kick. Another option to get really complicated, would be to stored either directly or as a reference, the Arnold version to be used in the job object at submission time or perhaps, injected via an event plugin automatically at submission time. This Key=Value entry could also be displayed in the Deadline Monitor via an “ExtraInfoX” column and be queried by the job plugin, or even a Slave Centric event callback such as “OnSlaveStartingJobCallback” which calls your SCM software deployment tool of choice, which then using the information (Arnold version) stored in the job, calls for automatic deployment of your Arnold software and configuration of your rendernode, so you get JIT - “Just In Time” software deployment and configuration for every job in your queue.
Hi Mike
Thank you for the detailed answer, that helps a lot and confirm pretty much hat I was thinking in a way, but better 
What do you think of making a bash script that finds out based on the environment variable which version of kick to pick up
and have that as a path ion the plug in directory of deadline ?
do you thin kit would work ?
btw I am on linux.
thx
Maurizio
The environment variable could be stored in the job if captured at submission time or you could query the env variable by modifying the existing python plugin file for Arnold Standalone. I don’t think you would need to use bash here at all. Alternatively, the Arnold Standalone Python file could just query for this env variable as the slave starts the job, works out the path based on the result of the environment variable and then continues to render the job at hand. In this case, it would just skip the plugin config path settings in the “Configure Plugins…” section.
Fanstastic
thank you so much for hte help
I will give it a try with your suggestion and bug you again in case I don’t make it !!
Cheers
Mau