Where should Thinkbox focus its development efforts for Jigsaw?
Add Jigsaw support to Cinema 4D
Add Jigsaw support to Nuke
Add Jigsaw animation support to Maya
Other (reply to this thread with other suggestions)
0voters
Jigsaw for Deadline is a feature that allows you to split up still images into arbitrary sized tiles, and send them to different machines to render simultaneously. Check out the Jigsaw page on the Deadline website for more information: deadline.thinkboxsoftware.com/jigsaw-1
This feature is becoming more and more popular, and we’d like your feedback to determine where we should be focusing our development efforts. We could either add Jigsaw support to applications that don’t already support it, or we can expand existing Jigsaw support for applications other than 3ds Max to track objects throughout an animation and only render the tiles that contain the object.
See this video for an overview on how Jigsaw animation already works for 3ds Max. youtu.be/1RYzjtAAJXw
Can I vote for an improved way to generated Jigsaw layouts?
There’s some awesome power in there for optimisation of rendering power but it’s such a pain to have to draw out the grid and subdivide based on where you think the rendering time will be.
I’ve asked Vlado and mentioned it here before that a ‘render-time’ prepass that would show where the render time would be through a black/white mask and then the subdividing of the tiles could be based off that, all automated
We would be dependent on the render engine supporting this kind of feature first.
Probably more effective in the short-term, is the monitor right-click, sub-divide existing tile renders into smaller tiles as a breakaway job, which still gets stitched back together with the original job. In theory, this should all be doable now via our API with some tile/jigsaw/draft knowledge, so you could write this yourself, if you fancy taking a stab at it?
This feature is enabled in plugin of deadline, if you could provide a automatic jigsaw rendering and defining feature in your standalone to improve the experience, it would be helpful.
I’m not convinced this would actually provide much of a benefit to 3dsMax users. The 3dsCmd monitor submitter already provides support for the old, equivalent Backburner style “strip” rendering. Jigsaw support isn’t possible as we need a ‘live’ socket connection or better to the host DCC application such as Maya or 3dsMax. Basic tile rendering support in the monitor, would require the user to first enter the render X,Y resolution as we can’t query the binary scene file, without the app being open. Without having the app open to visualise how many tiles in X,Y you need for optimal efficiency, I’m concerned of its limited use here in the monitor. As the functionality is open (we provide the syntax/logic, which you can review in our in-app/monitor submitters - see modo monitor submitter for an example), users can add this functionality themselves if needed.
I would still like to be able to see a preview system in the Deadline Monitor that allows you to see your assembled image as tiles complete, so you can spot any problems before the render finishes. This would be very useful!
From a high-level, an image viewer could provide this functionality. It could have an ‘overlay’ option to view the currently selected job’s jigsaw/tile regions in the viewer as a grid overlay. You mention “tiles complete” but also “render finishes”. To be clear, your asking for a progressive image stream whilst slaves are rendering each tile (hard → probably impossible, due to limitations of certain image formats) or viewing actually saved down to disk tile images for those that have completed and doing something different for those not yet completed; like leave blank or display [slaveName] placeholder.
I’m curious, what kind of errors will you be able to identify from looking at all the images in the context of a partially assembled image? Incorrect GI? Perhaps there is another way.
It needn’t be live tile streaming, just the finished tiles. In terms of feedback, it’ll allow the artists to check their renders well in advanced and spot potential technical issues like GI patches (which we have prebaking script to avoid), or machines that are lacking access to a plugin/license and have rendered their tile black, but also just artistic feedback, is it looking how we want, is the quality high enough at high resolution, it’s always good to be able to proof these things before the render is finished if we are in a super rush.
I use it for almost everything above 1080P as corona would often run out of ram because of channels
From a usability point of view something that would make managing tiles jobs better
See Tile Grid in the Monitor App
Preview of job frame as the tiles are completed (helps with spotting tiles to redo before completion)
Preview of completed tile job and select which tiles to rerender from there (currently doing a screen grab of viewport and printing it out to match grid) (based on exr preview i guess)
Save above preview as image
Object tracking in animation would be awesome feature
Render final result even if not all tiles are present
Manual Tile Submission makes preview of job (if possible)
Ability to generate the config file based on folder contents (following naming convention of course)
Can you clarify which 3D application you are using? While many Corona users tend to be 3ds Max users, some of your feature requests imply that you are not one of them.
Hey, just one small correction for a really stuid mistake:
I actually meant that those handles are too small. And even worse if I try to grab not the corner but a horizontal or vertical edge - there the move handle cursor only appears on an exact hit.
