Moving away from classic Deadline to Deadline Cloud? (Or Royal Render or something else?)

Deadline
1

Hi everyone,

With classic Deadline reaching its End of Life (EOL) and AWS shifting all focus to Deadline Cloud, I’m currently evaluating our studio’s options and wanted to reach out to the community to see what others are doing.

The Situation & Our Concerns

Like many of you, we’ve been waiting years for core features and better application integration in classic Deadline. It often felt like updates lagged behind or lacked depth:

  • Poor/Sloppy Integration: No official Houdini Solaris integration, no proper support for GPU rendering (including OptiX) in Blender, or waiting months for support of new software versions (like 3ds Max 2027).

  • Stagnant Core Features: Essential background service and worker features haven’t seen meaningful improvements in years. For instance: workers still cannot reliably detect a user’s idle time or login/logout state, and managing drive mappings within a background service remains a headache.

  • Missing Basic Flexibility: At the very least, it should be possible to easily re-render single broken frames regardless of task size.

Our Questions to You:

  1. Deadline Cloud: Has anyone here actually migrated to AWS Deadline Cloud yet? Does it work smoothly with a purely on-premise setup, or is it heavily tied to the cloud workflow?

  2. Alternative Render Managers: Have you already migrated to a different solution—or are you actively looking?

We’ve been looking at Royal Render, which seems to solve many of these pain points and doesn’t suffer from the same integration lag. However, migrating an entire pipeline to a completely new render manager is a major undertaking.

  • Has anyone here made the jump from Deadline to Royal Render? How painful was the transition?

  • Alternatively, if you are also looking to switch to Royal Render: Would anyone be interested in joining forces to approach them for a bulk migration discount or a sponsorship in exchange for sharing a case study/migration report?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences!

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I do agree with some of the points here but

I think the custom Husk submitter from the thread on the forum works well enough, anyone using Solaris should be able to get this up and running.

The Blender GPU script also seems to do the job.

3ds 2027 was released quickly considering other years were a much longer wait.

I don’t have any problems running idle log off, switching to service mode, drive mappings as service, maybe create a post with the issues.

I haven’t had much fun with Deadline Cloud, it’s documentation is incredibly convoluted and lacks the out of the box experience with Deadline10. The marketing videos may suggest it’s easier but this wasn’t my experience.

The cost to replace free on prem Deadline10 with DeadlineCloud doesn’t add up, Deadline10 is adequate for this, and until we’re priced out of hardware ownership it doesn’t make sense.

I’d like to see an open source project like (free) OpenCue being developed. I see Smedge has a new open source manager called SQI which uses Thinkbox’s OpenJobDescription.

It’s a shame Deadline10 isn’t open-sourced and left to community development, lots of handy fixes in this forum which could be better managed via git etc.

If you’re looking for discount from RR then you’re probably better off with the free version of Deadline

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If you’re looking for discount from RR then you’re probably better off with the free version of Deadline

If you have already choosen RR, then you should buy it.
But right now I would test it.
And I am unsure if my company invests for a long term test in our pipeline.

And a question does not hurt anyone.