Hi there,
We spoke about this before, but due to our 3dsmax deadline integration been delayed (production realities sidelined our efforts…), we kinda kinda sat back on the subject a little…
Deadline currently supports job, and task level dependencies. We have a pretty hard requirement for ‘external file’ dependency.
Imagine the following scenario:
FX artist has a complex setup, with several different interdependent simulations. A couple of fume sims (regular & wavelet that depends on the regular), a fume beauty render that depends on the results of the first 2 sims. Then a TP sim thats driven by fume, then a fluid simulation thats driven by TP, then an xmesh export of the TP, and then finally a bunch of different additional renders (different mattes, passes etc). Our pipeline lets you set all these up in one scene with a network of asset management nodes, and lets you publish all of them with a single click.
When you publish your work, each of these activities generate new versions in our database and then become dependent jobs in the network render system.
Some of these however are not 1 task = 1 frame type jobs. Some are 1 task = whole sequence jobs, typically all the sims are like that.
So for example, you have a 1000 frame long fume sim thats assigned to a single node, and is generating data per frame. The dependent render job currently monitors the file output. Frame 1010 of the render job gets unsuspended as soon as the dependent sim’s frame 1010 appears on disk (there is a periodical check for these files).
This is quite crucial for us, so if possible, would be best to work together on getting it into 6.1. We are now restarting the 3dsmax integration work, with hopes that by july / mid august we can start rolling over completely to deadline.
cheers,
laszlo