Hi
I’ve seen one thing - if you will set up VRay Off-load slaves more than machines you have - job will hang forever , as it waits for all the slaves to start spawners and connect. I am not sure it was a good idea to use just a “number” there as an input. Maybe it was better to use slave selection dialog there like white/black list ? You choose slaves you want to be used as spawners and deadline reserves them - thus you will not be able to choose slaves more than you have already.
Is there a way to make this with current setup ?
Thanks,
Oleg.

Hi Oleg,

Are you using Deadline v7.1.2.1?

The client feedback with have received thus far, is that they love not having to share a spreadsheet between their users to track which artist is using which specific slaves to run up VRay Spawner on.

Now that VRay v3.0 is out and quite a few studios are choosing to upgrade to it, we do have a wishlist item to add support for “immediate render start”, for off-load VRay DBR jobs. By this I mean, the job will start rendering once submitted and the other Deadline Slaves once they pick up the job will auto-join the render.

For the time being, you can use the “Machine List” or even “Limits” to declare a list of machines to use.

Yeah well i know about about machine lists and limits , thing is about the slave number setting itself - you can assign more slaves than actual machines you have , for example on day time there are 2 machines available for DR , at night there are 5 , so if i will assign 7 machines at daytime - it will pick up 2 machines and will wait for other 5 till night.
This can be solved by presets i suppose.
It’s cool you have that in wishlist , hope this will be implemented soon !

For sure, it’s on the ToDo list. The tricky part comes when you want this auto-add functionality for the other ‘interactive VRay dbr’ submission system we have. But I have an idea here…

You could write an event plugin which executes on the “OnJobSubmitted” callback event, identifies it’s a VRaySpawner job, looks up what time of day/what day it is, and then auto-adjusts the number of frames (1 frame = 1 dr slave) in the job props for this submitted job, then you won’t ever go over budget.

That’s actually a good idea , anyway i wanted to start learning Python
Can you kick me with a link where to start from writing this plugin ?
Thanks so much for your help !

Sure.

I would first read this:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … rview.html

then this:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … ugins.html

and look here for free examples we have:
github.com/ThinkboxSoftware/Deadline

and this one looks kinda close:
github.com/ThinkboxSoftware/Dea … etJobLimit

not a million miles away:
github.com/ThinkboxSoftware/Dea … obLimit.py

Thank you very much, Mike !

Mike, i had one more question,
Since there will be always a “master” slave which starts in workstation mode - is there a way to assign it ? I mean when i start the job i want to assign RF1 to be master and RF2 RF3 to be slaves (spawners). As i need licenses for 3dsmax to start it in workstation mode. Thanks

Could you use the “3dsCmd” plugin/submitter instead?

We added VRay DBR off-load support to it as well and as it works differently (uses 3dsmaxcmd.exe instead of 3dsmax.exe) the first task (master machine) doesn’t require a 3dsMax license, so it doesn’t matter which machine picks up the first task and gives you more flexibility.
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … on-options