Ok we figured out a very convoluted way last year to get interactive/render licenses to break out well.
We add the slaves to “Slaves to Use Interactive Licenses” inside the plugin configuration.
Then we add a whitelist of those slaves in a limit “XXX_Interactive” and add all other slaves to “Slaves Excluded from Limit”
Then we add a whitelist of all the render slaves in a limit “XXX_Render” and all of the interactive slaves to “Slaves excluded from limit”.
That all works but that’s 3 different menus to keep 6 different lists consistent. If a slave is in the wrong place in any of those 6 lists everything breaks down and fails.
I know I’ve been harping on this for years but I really wish there was a single built in concept of “Render and Interactive” licenses into limits. Then we could just define a limit group as a “Nuke \ Interactive” limit group and it would look at the plugin info and auto populate the lists internally and when we changed which machines were on the interactive license list it would automatically update the limit groups.
Interesting… I always figured that plugin feature would only be used for nodes that had node-locked interactive licenses (and therefore should use that over a floating render license).
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I assume you’re dealing with floating interactive licenses here; the ideal scenario would then be for all render nodes to prefer render licenses, and have them (possibly just a subset) overflow to use the interactive ones once the render-only licenses run out?
I’m mostly asking because that’s basically the exact scenario we had to solve for our third-party licensing stuff (use local licenses first, and overflow to UBL). The way we’ve done it is certainly not perfect, and doesn’t have any extension hooks currently, but it’s something we can look at generalizing and exposing for sure.
Tying that back to the Plugins, and telling the Slaves how to launch Nuke based on the kind of Limit it obtained is another issue though, and I’m not sure how we’d do it. Maybe it is just a flag we add on Limits that inherently does nothing, but Plugins look for… Something for us to ponder, for sure.
Yeah, for an application like 3ds max that is nodelocked it’s not important. But Nuke uses both floating and interactive. So when our nuke interactive licenses aren’t in use they function as render licenses.