It would be great if we could group frames into tasks even if they are out of order.
Sometimes artists render backwards, or every 10th frame first etc., and then task grouping basically doesn’t work.
This is on the wishlist. There are a couple of reasons why it hasn’t been implemented yet:
- We’d have to refactor the tasks to support an arbitrary list of frames, instead of just a range.
- Many applications that Deadline supports can only accept a range (ie: many command line renderers just accept a start and end frame argument, and wouldn’t know what to do with an arbitrary list).
To handle (2), we’d probably have to introduce a plugin flag (like the ConcurrentTasks one) that indicates whether the plugin can handle arbitrary frame lists, and those that don’t would have to process each frame (or at least each frame sequence in the task) separately.
We feel this will eventually happen in the future, but it hasn’t found its way on to a roadmap yet.
Cheers,
Ryan
Cool, i figured its something like this. Its confusing some users (even long time deadline users), that they can’t group frames simply because they are out of order, so this would be great.
The idea to handle them as individual frames would work perfectly even for applications that do support arbitrary lists (as a default behavior that could then be improved with later releases for more optimal performance)