Manual Maya job submission

treboras · May 4, 2021, 7:59am

Hi guys!

I have hundreds of different maya files to render and I would like to automate that by submitting them to deadline per Windows 10 command line.

I read the manual submission page in the help but it was not very specific.

Could you help me out what I need to put in the script? The scenes are all set up correctly and only need the basic Deadline options to render.

Thanks in advance!
Trebo

Bobo · May 4, 2021, 3:38pm

The easiest way to figure it out would be this:

Submit a Maya Job using the Maya Monitor submitter.
Double-click the Job in the Monitor to open the Job Properties, and select the Submission Params section
Press the Export button to save the JobInfo and PluginInfo control files to disk as a reference (you could also fish out the temp. files used in the submission, but this is easier).

Now write a script that generates on set of JobInfo and PluginInfo files for every Maya scene you have on disk.
- In every PluginInfo file, include the SceneFile= entry pointing at the corresponding Maya file. The other important entry in the PluginInfo file is the Version=20xx line. You should also provide the ProjectPath. Most of the rest are optional, but you can copy them from the sample file.
- In every JobInfo file, include the OutputDirectory0 for that job, or optionally skip it, and reuse the same JobInfo file for all Jobs. The main entries that you really need in JobInfo are Plugin=MayaBatch, UserName= with your user name, MachineName= with your computer name, Frames= with the frame list.
In the script, also create a text file to use a initial arguments control file of the deadlinecommand CLI
- Start the file with the command option -SubmitMultipleJobs .
- For each Job to submit, add a -Job line.
- Write the paths of the JobInfo and PluginInfo files on each line as described in the Long Command Lines topic.

The control text file would look something like this:

-SubmitMultipleJobs
-Job
\\path\to\job_1_info_file.txt
\\path\to\job_1_plugin_file.txt
-Job
\\path\to\job_2_info_file.txt
\\path\to\job_2_plugin_file.txt
-Job
\\path\to\job_3_info_file.txt
\\path\to\job_3_plugin_file.txt

Once you are done writing the control file and the JobInfo and PluginInfo files, call the deadlinecommand with the control file as argument.
```
deadlinecommand controlfile.txt
```

This will submit all jobs with all the Maya scene files in one go.

treboras · May 5, 2021, 1:14pm

Thank you for the very detailed explanation. Worked like a charm!!!

Just a small detail: If you happen to give someone else the same guide, mention that one may have to put the deadline /bin folder into the environment variables or the “deadlinecommand” is not recognized.