Looking for a Newbie Walkthrough

New here and have spent a few hours installing and reading through the 1000 pages+ manual. It’s obviously a fantastic document and extremely useful if you’ve spent half your life as a network IT administrator. I’ve built a lot of machines and managed my own render farm of 6 machines and I’ve dealt with the windows networking and issues surrounding that and I’m pretty good at it. But I’m primarily a one-man shop and an artist. I’m not a programmer. But I am intrigued with this “Deadline 8” concept.

I guess you could say my participation here would be from the perspective of your average 3d guy who knows a lot about 3d but not as much about programming. If I can get things rolling, then there are 1000s of others like me who might be able to do the same.

For we 3d guys who are looking for a better Render Farm way, Thinkbox teases us with a fantastic solution. However, I cannot figure out the workflow to get started and actually submit a test animation. You might be saying, “if you aren’t a network IT guy or a programmer, they why are you here?” The answer is actually taken from the website’s home page, “You’ll be up and running quickly with Deadline’s easy install process, and your team will be able to learn the simple to use interface in no time.”

I’m not finding it that easy or intuitive. Is there a workflow document that steps you through the process of starting the necessary processes and submitting a project for rendering?

Hey RobH2,

Welcome! All constructive feedback is good; positive or negative. I’m intrigued by your comments. Did you see this section in our docs: “Getting Started”? - docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … ng-started

You didn’t mention a particular application or platform. Maya on Linux? 3dsMax? I’m wondering if we need to create a simple “My First Job” kinda page in our docs as a walk-through. Although, I wonder for which app/platform we should do this for? The most popular is probably going to be 3dsMax or Maya on Windows.

Did you have any difficulty with the Deadline software installation as this is typically the tricky bit where most users get stuck and we spend most of our time making sure our “installers” just work…

Thanks for the feedback sir. Keep it coming!