Hey, just thinking out loud on this one.
Sometimes our guys will submit a job that has, say, 300 frames to render. They will need the entire frame range, but would sometimes prefer specific frames to come out first. Is there a way to prioritize certain tasks over others, without modifying the frame range? For example you could select a handful of tasks, then right-click and say “Prioritize Task.”
I feel like this would be a good substitution for resubmitting tasks as new jobs, or suspending the ones you don’t want rendered first, or whatever other method exists to get instant gratification on specific frames. What do you guys think?
You could change the order of the frame list on submission. For example, instead of this:
frames=1-300
You could do this:
frames=150-160,1-300
This will render frames 150-160 first, and then the rest. Note that we never duplicate frames for a job, which is why you can use ‘1-300’ in the second part. All frame list formatting options can be found in the Deadline documentation under Getting Started -> Submitting Jobs.
Cheers,
Ryan
That’s great to know! Thanks, I will try that out.
You can do all sorts of magic there, like 1-100x10, 1-100, so it would do every 10th first then fill in the rest, etc
I made sure the team knows about this feature now. But I’m still wondering. Is there a good method for this after the job has been submitted? Artists will need to specify this before submitting the job, or they will have to cancel frames if they remember too late.
You can RC a job and click “modify frame range” post submission in the monitor. Note that completed frames will remain completed, but actively rendering tasks will get re-queued. So, yeah, it’s best if artists specify before submission, otherwise frames will probably get cancelled and re-queued. Is there an in-app or monitor submission script for a particular application which needs a drop-down list of various frame sequence options?
Yeah, the “modify frame range” option works great if you do it pretty soon after submitting your job, or remember to do it upon submission. But let’s say someone submits a 2 hour/frame job without remembering to specify their priority frames until an hour later. By that time the job has already picked up on 30-40 machines, so if we modify the frame range at that point, we will be destroying 30-40 render-hours just to specify a few frames for faster assignment. It would be great to have an option for this that can be done post-submission without re-queuing frames.
Sure. So, you RC the frames (tasks) that you wish to process faster, then click “Resubmit Tasks” as a new job and then you can increase it’s priority / move to another pool / whatever suits your needs. You can mark the old tasks as failed or completed in the existing, currently running job.
Alternatively, if you know ahead of time, that certain frames will need to run before/faster than others, then you could setup a workflow which submits a “preview job” of certain frames and then a “do the rest/filler in job”, which runs after the 1st preview job has completed or say, a certain number of frames have completed in the case of a “per frame dependency” being set.
The 3dsMax SMTD has a working example of the above workflow. That’s why I asked previously what in-app/monitor submission script you were using, so I could potentially point you in the direction of a applicable example.
Cheers,
Mike