Commandline Submitting

Render Manager General
#1

Perhaps I’m jumping the gun here and I’ve totally missed, but do you guys have hooks in the Render Manager where we could build our own submitter and build a commandline code to fire to Pulze RM ?

We’re currently still using Renderpal which has been EOL’d last year.
With Renderpal, we were able to build our own submitter (with automated outputs and sceneprep code for elements and presets etc. buidling a cmd string into a bat that got fired of to Renderpal.

Pulze is still on my radar as a possible replacement for our 92 node renderfarm (56 dedicated + 36 workstations) but without commandline access I’m not sure.

If it doesn’t, maybe you could convince me why I shouldn’t need it in the first place (because of x, y Pylze RM functions) or a this is why you should choose Pulze over Deadline.

#2

Hello Yves,

Thanks for reaching us out!

You are right, there is no option at the moment to create jobs by command line. That is why we developed Scene Manager where you can prepare numerous jobs for batch rendering.

Of course we are curious how your own submitter works and what are the benefits so we’d love to take a closer look. Maybe it could be easily integrated as a tailor made option.

The good news is that the new version of Render Manager is around the corner. The closed beta testing will start next week so I gladly recommend giving it a try.

If you are interested please send us a mail at support@pulze.io and we will contact you shortly.

So my suggestion is to take a look at the Pulze Scene Manager as well. It is the perfect solution for scene preparation. You can predefine your scenes with all the variables and outputs and it seamlessly works together with the Render Manager. On top of that it provides instant visual feedback for you. It is made to make the life of the Artists easier.

So I gladly recommend trying out the complete Scene Manager + Render Manager workflow. It is a game changer :wink:

For more info about the Scene Manager please visit our webpage. https://pulze.io/products/scene-manager

Please also let me highlight the selling points of Render Manager:

  • Maximize the utilization of your farm : “Automatic resource allocation” and “Requirement based Node filtering” provide maximized capacity utilization. If you like micro management then you have the option to manually control everything but RM is capable of automatically distributing all the jobs and filling up the gaps for you.

  • Get instant visual feedback on the fly : You can check each and every frame’s progress, remaining time, and even a snapshot of the current state of the image

  • Tailor made for Artists : It is made for the new generation of Artists. So it has a quick learning curve and it is very comfortable to use.

  • A hardware and software management tool : It keeps track of all your PC’s stats, installed DCCs, render engines and plugins.

So again, I’d love to have a discussion about the details so please do not hesitate to contact us at support@pulze.io

Best regards,

Attila

#3

Hi Attila, thanks for replying.

Our current Submitter tools does a whole lot of automated stuff.
It reads the maxfilepath and breaks that up in date which we use for automated outputs and
naming.
So it reads the folder the scene is in, which will be the name of the outputfile (say Ext 01.tif)
It reads the projectname from that same path, which gets fed into Renderpal so the projectname column of the renderjob has an entry.
The submitter interface has a field for a sufffix which gets translated to renderpal tags which will get fed into the tags column of renderpal. (but also adds it to the renderfile, which gets saved as a copy of the workfile with _RP added to the filename)
I can submit 3 seperate job passes in one go because when I press submit a the current rendersettings get saved, a copy of the file get saved which is the actual file renderpal is getting fed to render, then I change rendersettings in the scene, save another copy which get submitted to renderpal, then the original settings get put back, then changed again for yet another pass (or not if that pass is turned of in the submitter)

None of our users has to deal with output paths and rendersettings and naming files (other than a suffix if needed)

A lot of automation mostly as you can see. and this is not even half of what it does.
Most of it is also related to scenePrep in regards to renderelements and checks for required stuff though, which can and will be split off to a seperate tool so we’ll be less dependend on which rendermanager to use. All that is currently way to much intertwined in one big submitter script with a whole lot of interdependant functions

It’s hard to explain what it all does without being able to show it.