AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

deprecated job submission method

Is Thinkbox deprecating the SMTDFunctions.SubmitJob() method in deadline? It doesn’t appear to have much in the documentation in deadline 8 or later.

Will all jobs eventually require that users submit using the SMTDFunctions.waitForCommandToComplete … with job files?
for 3ds max specifically.

I ask because I’ve rewritten a good portion of Thinkbox’s deadline submission scripts in python in order to make Deadline more user friendly with the modern python based pipelines. Knowing this bit of information will allow me to prioritize if i should create a new submission method wrapper for Deadline. :frowning:

I guess it was a case of bad function naming. That function was never meant to be used by 3rd parties, and even SMTD itself does not use it much. It was mainly intended for spawning from a Slave a simple job that does not require all the functionality that SMTD provides, so it should have been named something like SimpleSubmission()… It lacks a lot of the bells and whistles available in the real function that SMTD uses.

SMTD’s submit button calls the SMTDFunctions.SubmitJobFromUI() which has special handling for every crazy case like submitting preview jobs, Jigsaw and Tile jobs, submitting dependent QuickTime jobs, and whatnot. It respects most of the options exposed in the SMTD UI, but that means that 3rd party would have to make sure every single SMTDSetting property makes sense, so it is not necessarily optimal for 3rd party scripts either.

The recommended way of submitting jobs has always been to build the JOB files (or let SMTD build them for you), construct the command line and call the DeadlineCommand either yourself, or via waitForCommandToComplete(). It gives you the most flexibility. This is why the very first tutorial about submitting Deadline jobs with MAXScript uses that approach :slight_smile: deadline.thinkboxsoftware.com/cu … submission

In SMTD 10, we are adding ways for 3rd parties to totally modify the SMTD appearance and SUBMIT button functionality via so-called “Workflows” which are a struct of mandatory, optional, and custom functions and properties that can be provided by a workflow script dropped in a Workflows folder. All Workflows appear in a drop-down list on top of SMTD, and selecting one can replace the content of all tabs and rollouts, and redefine what the SUBMIT button does. So things like simulating FumeFX and Phoenix, baking textures, exporting V-Ray Standalone, RedShift or Arnold jobs can be implemented within the SMTD UI framework instead of writing external scripts that use SMTD backend without the SMTD front-end… In other words, instead of writing a standalone FumeFX submission script like the one at the end of the tutorial deadline.thinkboxsoftware.com/cu … submission you can roll that logic into SMTD itself.

But that probably does not affect you much, as it is for a different type of integration…

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