Fusion Console slave

Deadline
1

Hi,



On our renderfarm we use ConsoleSlave.exe to render out comps. But this way the “normal” Fusion5.1 installation doesn’t want to render with deadline at all.

Is it possible to render somehow on workstations if only Fusion5.1 installed on them?



Thank for any help,



Attila Sziklai

Focus Fox

2

Oh… on the other hand sometimes the render tasks are marked as completed while those machines drop these errors and are unable to render. Of course the frames are not completed.



Attila

3

Hey Attila,

You can add other applications to the plugins configuration for Fusion. Go into the Deadline Monitor, log in as super user, and go to the tools menu.

From there, select configure plugins and go to Fusion in the left hand menu. From there, go to RenderExecutable5_1. Presumably this field currently looks something like this:

c:\program files\fusion render slave\consoleslave.exe

You can modify it to something like this:

c:\program files\fusion render slave\consoleslave.exe;c:\program files\fusion\fusion.exe

This way if it doesn't find the first application, it will go to the second one that's specified. This is also useful if you're trying to run a mixed 32-bit / 64-bit farm.

I'm not sure why it would report success in the case you're describing. Generally if it can't find the application it's trying to render with, Deadline will return an error....

Sean Konrad
-------------------
Technical Director
Frantic Films
4

Hi Sean,

Thanks for the answers!

I did know that ";" trick but I was not brave enough to configure Deadline2.7 yet.
Will this work with the same syntax as consoleslave.exe? Or Deadline will deal with it?

Tomorrow I'll try it for sure.

best regards,

Attila

5

I believe the syntax for the underlying scripts should be exactly the same, but let me know if anything goes wrong. I think the only difference between the console slave and a full instance of Fusion is that you may not see as much in the way of error reporting.



Sean Konrad

-------------------

Technical Director

Frantic Films

6

It works fine now.

Thank you Sean!



Attila

7

Trying this out, it seems that it uses a Fusion license instead of a RenderSlave license. This could be bad during working hours. Is that a bug or just the tradeoff?


  • Chad
8

Hmm have you installed the renderNode and Fusion on the same machine?

Anyway I think deadline should use the order what you define in its plugin settings. If the order is Fusion.exe;consolSlave.exe then it will use Fusion. Isn’t it the problem?



Btw can I get rid of the windows Fusion splash screen somehow? Very annoying especially during slave mode.

9

We have consoleslave.exe first, fusion.exe second. When it fails to find consoleslave.exe it runs fusion.exe.



That’s fine.



Problem is, it’s using a fusion license, not a renderslave license.


  • Chad
10

Chad,



I may be wrong here, but it would make sense for the workstation copy of

fusion.exe to use up a fusion license, and I don’t think there is an

option to do otherwise. If you want to use up a render slave license,

why not just install the renderslave on the workstation?





Attila,



I’m not sure if we could hide the splash screen, because that’s part of

Fusion. An option would be to all the Fusion app to start in the Hidden

window state, but Fusion is known to sometimes popup dialogs during

rendering, and if we start up fusion in the hidden state, I’m not sure

if our popup detectors would detect them. This would be something we

would have to experiment with.





Cheers,

11

Thanks Ryan.