This is probably a silly question, but I can’t find documentation anywhere, and I suspect its because I’m using the wrong word. As a background, in other programs (like Maxwell), you can use macros to auto-fill in information that the program grabs from defined functions. For example in Maxwell, when filling in the output name, I could enter

Myrender_%scenename%_%camera%.png

which would pull the file name (scene name) and camera name.

Is there anything like that in Deadline? Or is that down to a plugin to plugin basis? I’m trying to simplify the submission process for my colleagues using the SketchUp submitter and would love some help.

Thanks

Hi,
Typically we would refer to them internally as “tokens” or “token replacement”. Your right, this is highly dependent on the application supporting it or anything we can work with to make it happen. In the case of Sketchup, the API is very limited in broad terms. Do you need this for the standard renderer in Sketchup or V-Ray? (I’m told that: “…VRayForSketchUp has a way of setting output Paths but does not appear to have any way of pulling the output paths…”).

Ok, interesting. We are riding the fence right now between submitting via SKP/vray via the built in sketchup/deadline submitter versus exporting vrscene files from sketchup and manually submitting those. Obviously I much prefer the manual submission of the vrscene files as it offers a ton of “pros” but I wish it was a bit more streamlined and could pull some of this stuff from the file (1-click solutions are best for most staff members).

Off the top of your head, is there a way this would work with vray standalone submissions?

We have a couple of outstanding dev tickets to investigate what we can do to improve the UX of job submission in SKP with or without V-Ray. With a brand new version of V-Ray just out, it is a bit of a moving target. However, we have made some in-roads recently to improve SKP, although it took quite a bit of change in our core, just to add an API function, so we could then ‘work-around’ a silly SKP thing. Unfortunately, all this takes a bit of time…but we are getting there!

Gotcha - I’ve been the one annoying Edwin with a bunch of SKP issues recently and we really appreciate the push on a platform, that honestly, probably doesn’t have a ton of adopters. Part of the reason we have moved over to exporting vrscene files from skp/vray3 and then manually submitting via Deadline is that there is much more universal support for vrscene files (not just from you guys, but also offsite render farms, which adds a of flexibility to our workflow).

I have a compelling argument to make that skp submissions to deadline that are via vray SHOULD be done via the vrscene route (btw this would also save a ton of frustration for you guys). I’m sure its difficult to implement, but a single button press that exports the vrscene file and then submits that same one to deadline (parsing the output information embedded in the vrscene and applying that to the job info) would pretty much be ideal

The only downside with focusing on V-Ray export is renderer lock-in. We try to use whatever built-in render control system exists so if you’d want to use say, Redshift in SketchUp (whenever that happens), we’d be ahead of the curve. Totally agree though that for V-Ray it’s a much smoother process to do the exports.