AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Deadline/script help

Hi all,

I’m trying to work out a solution to hopefully a simple problem, that I imagine a lot of users here will already have come up against!

So the problem - we want to render though Deadline using a render file (likely to only have lights and camera in) loading in geom with xref scenes. When geom changes, just save over xref of model and restart task in Deadline. That’s all fine, nothing strange and of course works. But we then overwrite the previous renders, as expected.

We need to keep versions of the old renders in case we need them in comp etc. or the new render goes wrong. So I though a pre-render script maybe could copy the existing renders into a versioned folder next to the renders (V01 for example) then render and overwrite the originals. Not sure if this makes sense or if anyone has to do this at their studio?!

Otherwise the only other way I can think is every time to want to re-render with changes, you have to open the render max file and change the save location every time. We need the main output renders file names to stay the same so nuke or AE or Photoshop can reference them for quick revisions as they will always load in the latest images.

Ideally, there would be a facility to achieve this through Deadline with a simple tick box once setup in the monitor.

Thanks, any help or insight would be very helpful.
Mark

You could automate this with event script (OnJobFinishedCallback).

docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produ … ugins.html

Hi,

That does look interesting, I’ll have to take a look. Im no coder, so I’ll see how far I get!!

So, I’ve tried and failed to work it out!

If anyone has any help for me to write an Event plugin using OnJobRequeued - as when a frame/job is first submitted, it will render as normal, only on a requeue would it need to run and move/copy the frames.

Thanks,
Mark

OnJobRequeued is going to have this trigger inside the Monitor, so the copy is going to do a round trip from the file server through the workstation that triggered it. It may lock up the Monitor while doing that, though I think these days it should go inside the Sandbox. The benefit on the OnJobFinished() is that it would usually be on a render node (unless someone forced the job to ‘completed’ in the Monitor).

I guess you can’t just do a move operation because people could be using the current version. It would be significantly faster to just move the existing output folders on the requeue.

Interesting points. Yes I think the move operation would be good, but as you say, until the new renders appear, all the links will be dead as the files will be missing.

I think it could work if it happens on job end. But equally your point about the benefit being it would usually happen on a render node, that is true of the OnJobRequeued, a render node would be picking up the job to render the task again. For our purposes, and maybe for a test, it will be mainly still images, so maybe 12 RE’s, a total of around 500 meg say for each “still image” rendered. I can see how if your rendering massive .exr’s and your talking many gigs of data each time, it will slow up.

Not sure what the Sandbox is/means?

Mark

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