Looking at Deadline’s logs, it seems to open and render using nukefmf -t. Is -t the default method? In conclusion, what I’m curious about is: does Deadline render farm use -t because it’s more effective than -x??
Does anyone know about this?"
There’s a list of the commands here
https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/comp_environment/configuring_nuke/command_line_operations.html
-t is the commandline option to launch without GUI, -x eXecutes a nuke script and -X renders the specified node in the script.
I don’t know if this is the answer you are looking for but I had to look into this. Deadline starts nuke in terminal mode and loads your script. It then keeps that Nuke session alive to render the various tasks by issuing new render commands to that session. This is more efficient than loading Nuke just to render a couple of frames and letting it shut down again, and then starting over for the next task.
I had to look into this because I has a script with some tricksy stuff in it that was rendering incorrectly. I figured out that it was caused by the way Deadline was changing the current frame in those active terminal sessions. Sorry I don’t remember the specific problem.