Would it be possible to group dependent jobs in a treeview in the monitor?
Sometimes we have a single nuke render that spawns 10-15 dependent jobs (individual templating of outputs, uploads to shotgun, logging in asset management database, proxy generation etc). Would be nice if i could just see the nuke job, with a + sign, and when opened, i would see the direct dependents, then the dependents under that etc.
Maybe this is not so easy with the multiple cross dependencies that can now be created, but im curious what you guys think.
would it be enough to have a container node for the graph like a BLOP? just curious if this is a control thing [deleting one containerjob deletes everything inside container for example] or whether you just want a cleaner/slimmer display.
bear with me for a second because what you ask is not as easy as you suggest - what if you have multiple dependencies in a chain?
or projects that are cross dependent [or jobs that are all dependent on the same asset but not connected otherwise] do they show up in all of them? do you havae to hit ++++ 5 times to get something further down the tree? [in that case the node view is a better option]…many complications here.
just thinking aloud…maybe we just need a container object in both the node view and the listview that you can put things into as you see fit, eg. at submission time or manually via the UI…it could contain whatever you want so you can manage it as you see fit. otherwise i can see it getting quite complicated and in the end creating more complication rather than tidying things up…
If Deadline had the high-level concept that all jobs are potentially part of a project/sequence/shot, then you can effectively categorise all jobs where “project != default ‘none’ setting” in either the list view or node dependency graph view. Doesn’t matter if the client is hooked up to a Production Tracking/DAM system or not in the case of “none” (just like Deadline has the concept of none pool and none group - ie: it still works). The first step to realise this, would be dedicate 3 new data fields in Deadline job architecture to Project/Sequence/Shot, which can be left empty or default setting of ‘none’ if not used by a studio. For those that do use it, then all jobs can effectively be filtered visually, sometimes in partnership with actual job/asset dependencies between the jobs, even if they are ‘shared assets’ between ‘projects’.
Project / Sequence / Shot seems like a no-brainer for going forward. At the very least project. Maybe also “Asset”. We sometimes fire off turntables etc.
Actually, maybe an additional group ID field, or something like that would be good for our use.
Whenever we do a publish, a number of jobs get generated,… so say you publish a lighting scene, it could spaw a couple of render jobs, some caching jobs, a nuke camera export script job etc. If i could say “all of these belong to one group” or “one publish”, and they would show up in a little treeview, that would be great. That way i dont get 5-10 jobs in the list per publish, just one entry, and if needed i could click on that, and open that up to see whats happening in there
This was part of the reason we added the Extra Info fields to a job. Studios could populate these with anything, and then filter/sort on them in the Monitor. With 10 extra info fields, adding 3 more fields that may or may not be used by a studio is probably unnecessary, right?
We have considered this idea, but I wonder if we could extend it so that any job column could be used to group jobs together. In this case, an Extra Info field could contain the group ID (something arbitrary that your studio comes up with). But then you could also group by pool, plugin, user, etc.
Great idea! I think thats the best way to go about it.
Also would be nice if this ‘group’ item would show some sort of aggregate information about the jobs within, like progress would be averaged, submit time would be minimum submit time etc.
Oh yes, much better than my comment about 3 dedicated fields for project/seq/shot. This would be far more flexible and reminds me of one of Gavin’s UI setup’s where within the monitor UI, there is expandable tree groupings for multiple projects and also MULTIPLE sequences and shots PER project with lots of dependent assets/scripts/other jobs. I think having the expandable tree type of view, would help to visualise all these jobs going through a queue. Clicking on one of these “grouped” jobs would also show all these jobs accordingly in the job node dependency view graph.
Also on Laszlo’s comment, I would go as far as to say, have this information accessible via the API as well in the future. Studios might want to grab a load of information for project totals into a DB for reference in the future.
