Is it possible for the slaves to come on at set times and turn off at times? We have lots of artist workstations we would like to utilize but can't due to (people not remembering to join the pool the manager could do it at each workstation but it would be much easier to manage if they came on at x time and turned off at y time).
Any suggestions?
p.s. We are mid eval of this tool and I must say we have evaluated them all and this is by far the best solution on the market.
We are going to try it on a 64 bit machine and see how it goes.
Deadline doesn’t support this feature yet, but it’s been on our todo
list for a while to add some sort of scheduling functionality. However,
there is a screen server for Deadline that you can setup on your
workstations. When it starts up, it starts the Deadline slave with it.
Cheers,
Yes we are running the screen saver but hate to stop a frame while it is working. Thanks for your help.
P
Stopping the screen saver doesn’t stop the slave, so a frame would only
be stopped if a user closes the slave. From the slave, you can select
Control -> Stop Slave After Current Task Completion, so that the slave
closes on its own after the current frame has finished rendering. It
would basically be a judgment call by the user what they choose to do.
This would theoretically be an issue with stopping the slaves on a
schedule automatically. For example, if a slave starts an 8 hour frame
at 8am, and it’s scheduled to stop at 9am, do we stop the slave at 9am
and requeue the task, or do we tell the slave to stop rendering after it
finishes its task (which won’t happen until 4pm)? We don’t want to kill
a long render, but we also don’t want to tie up a workstation all day
waiting for a frame to complete. Theoretically, we could make an
estimate based on the previous render times and make a decision off of
that, but this isn’t always reliable.
Cheers,
That is a good point. We have a number of people that leave at the end of the day and their system is sitting idle for over 12 hours each night. If we were able to turn on the renderer and access the mapped directory as a separate user (if person x is logged in then deadline can use the login info of Y to access mapped directories).
We would be able to leverage a lot of systems. Since we can pool the licenses we can simplify the rendering pools.
Just a question or work around.
Thanks
P Patel
