Sure thing, as a general intro to submitting jobs manually, have a look here: https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/products/deadline/10.0/1_User%20Manual/manual/manual-submission.html#manual-submission-ref-label
To see what your current jobs have been submitted like, you can check out their properties in the Deadline Monitor: Double-click job>Submission params
There’s also an export option from this page, if you want to export the information.
As for what “stuff” a plugin actually looks for, that’s a trickier one. Usually you’d use the above method to figure out the common stuff, but you may need to dig into the plugin itself or at least the submitter provided by Thinkbox to find all possible values.
As an example, here’s a standard MayaBatch render from our farm (apologies for the heavy redaction):
To give this a little bit more context, here’s the Python dictionaries that were used to generate the job:
maya_info = {
'Plugin': 'MayaBatch',
'Name': name,
'Comment': comment,
'BatchName': batchName,
'NotificationTargets': notificationTarget,
'PostJobScript': postJobScript,
'PreTaskScript': config.FILE_PRETASKSCRIPT,
'ExtraInfo0': slackUserID,
'ExtraInfo1': assetCode,
'ExtraInfo2': assetName,
'ExtraInfo3': assetCategory,
'ExtraInfo4': productionFolder,
'ExtraInfo5': timecode,
'ExtraInfo6': show,
'ExtraInfo7': deleteRenderOutput,
'ExtraInfo8': ffmpegOutputDir,
'ExtraInfo9': config.PIPELINEBASE,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue0=focalLength': focalLength,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue1=camName': camName,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue2=imagePlane': imagePlane,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue3=hash': hash,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue4=renderFolder': renderFolder,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue5=renderFileType': renderFileType,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue6=renderEngine': renderEngine,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue7=isPartialRender': isPartialRender,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue8=preRoll': preRoll,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue9=trc': trc,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue10=pushDownstream': pushDownstream,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue11=isRsProxyThumb': isRsProxyThumb,
'ExtraInfoKeyValue12=extraNotificationTargets': extraNotificationTargets,
'Pool': pool,
'SecondaryPool': '',
'MachineLimit': '0',
'Priority': priority,
'OnJobComplete': 'Nothing',
'ConcurrentTasks': concurrentTasks,
'Department': '',
'Group': group,
'LimitGroups': '',
'JobDependencies': '',
'Whitelist': '',
'InitialStatus': 'Active',
'OutputFilename0': outputFilename,
'Frames': frameList,
'ChunkSize': chunkSize,
'MinRenderTimeSeconds': 0,
'TaskTimeoutSeconds': 0,
'TaskTimeoutMinutes': taskTimeoutMins,
'StartJobTimeoutSeconds': 0,
'StartJobTimeoutMinutes': 0,
'InitializePluginTimeoutSeconds': 0,
'OnTaskTimeout': 'Error',
'EnableTimeoutsForScriptTasks': 'False',
'EnableFrameTimeouts': 'False',
'EnableAutoTimeout': 'False'
}
maya_plugin = {
'Animation': '1',
'Renderer': 'redshift',
'UsingRenderLayers': '0',
'LocalRendering': '1',
'RenderLayer': '',
'RenderHalfFrames': '0',
'FrameNumberOffset': '0',
'StrictErrorChecking': '1',
'GPUsPerTask': gpusPerTask,
'GPUsSelectDevices': '',
'RedshiftVerbose': '2',
'Version': MAYA_VERSION,
'UseLegacyRenderLayers': '0',
'Build': '64bit',
'ProjectPath': projectPath,
'StartupScript': startupScript,
'ImageWidth': imageWidth,
'ImageHeight': imageHeight,
'OutputFilePath': outputFilePath,
'OutputFilePrefix': outputFilePrefix,
'Camera': camera,
'CountRenderableCameras': '1',
'SceneFile': sceneFile,
'IgnoreError211': '0',
'UseLocalAssetCaching': '0'
}
Hopefully that’s somewhat useful, even with limited access to what most of those variable are.
As for your questions:
- You specify a
PreJobScript in the Job Info section, in my case maya_info (though I don’t have that parameter in the dictionary above, because we’re not using it – yet)
- Correct, but you can use Deadline’s path map translations and whatever else you need in order to make the paths as global as possible. However, if you’re strictly using local rendering and the file will only be accessed by the worker that created it, you could absolutely use a local drive/path
- Yes this was my assumption. So you kick off a job for a file that doesn’t exist, but will be created by the
PreJobScript. This script runs before any render tasks start. You would also probably delete the file with a PostJobScript, after a successful upload of the output. I’m just guessing here
- Yes, sorry
- I just mean all the stuff in my/your
maya_info object that you will need to build the scene. More specifically the ExtraInfo and ExtraInfoKeyValue fields. Alternatively if you are using an asset manager of some description, you could just include an ID/hash that you can query your API server with, to receive all the relevant data on-demand
Probably a good time to mention that this is just how I do it, and by extension how our studio does it. I’m not sure if there is a right or wrong way – just do whatever works for you. As you can see, we are not generating files on-demand like you are, but we are doing quite a lot of processing in the PostJobScript (like sanity checks, versioning, auto comps, tracking, notifications, etc).
Best of luck!
