Hi, folks,
We have a show going where the scene files are quite large, so we want to submit our jobs using DeadlineCommand, without opening XSI or Deadline GUIs. I read the docs on this and created a jobinfo file called “myjob.txt” containing this script:
Plugin=XSIBatch
ForceReloadPlugin=false
Frames= 88-149
Priority=90
Pool=HI_PASS
Name=01b_028_05_Lighting_v000_025 - Characters_RGB
OutputDirectory0=\fileserver\storage\projects\FOOJOB\Reels\01b\028\05\Render_Pictures\Layers\Characters_RGB
OutputFilename0=028_05_Characters_RGB####.exr
I launched it using this command in separate script
DeadlineCommand.exe myjob.txt \fileserver\storage\projects\FOOJOB\Reels\01b\028\05\Scenes\Lighting\028_05_Lighting_v000_025.scn
It submitted all right, but I couldn’t find any docs on how to specify the pass. I tried putting Passes=Characters_RGB in the jobinfo script but it threw an error.
My Questions:
Is there any documentation on this?
Am I using the right workflow to do this? I would rather just text edit one long script for all the jobs and launch that, rather than having a jobinfo script and a separate launch script for each pass.
If I try to launch these jobs through the Deadline GUI, there is no option to specify the output path until after you submit the jobs and modify the properties. With a few dozen passes this becomes quite repetitious.
Thanks
Geoff
Hi Geoff,
There is a plugin info file that is also submitted with the job, and this file contains plugin-specific (in this case, xsi-specific) settings that are used. The files would be submitted in this order:
DeadlineCommand.exe myjob.txt myplugin.txt \fileserver\storage\projects\FOOJOB\Reels\01b\028\05\Scenes\Lighting\028_05_Lighting_v000_025.scn
For an example plugin info file, submit an XSI job from within XSI. Then, right-click on the job in the Monitor and select Explore Repository Directory. Look for the xsi_plugin_info.job file, and open it in a text editor (it’s just a text file). That should hopefully give you enough information to get you going.
Cheers,
That’s what I needed, thanks, but I still don’t have a workflow for my second question. Is the only workflow to have these 2 files per job (pass) and launch with that command? If so, I suppose I need a TD to write me another script to get all this done from one list of scenes/passes and generate the plugininfo and jobinfo and launch them. It’s just too tedious to do it through the interface.
Sorry, I missed that second part. You’re right though, you would want to submit pass, which means submitting those 2 files (plus the scene file) per job.
Our guy thinks this can be done using jscript but of course everyone’s too busy to write it. I just wanted to check if that was my only option, thanks for the prompt reply.
If you want to batch submit without opening XSI, then this is really you’re only option. Our integrated XSI submission script has an option to submit every pass as a single job, but of course that requires you to open XSI. 