Backburner 2012 crap

[Codi]

I was told by an Autodesk rep. during an Exaclibur webinar that if I wanted any improvement in the render manager I better get Deadline. I don't want any new feature, if it did (reliably) what it is supposed to do it would be great ...

[kimgar]

i uninstalled bb 2012 on my workstation and installed bb 2008 on it, all slaves still have bb 2012, works fine.
not as fine as deadline i am sure, but still it works.

gotta make some money, gotta get some deadline, that power issue actually is a nice addon

[squeakybadger]

You can sign up for a 30 day trial too.

We have a lot of custom tools written for Deadline now. It has saved us massive amounts of time and the support is extremely good.

What sort of thing do your custom tools do? We are just looking into deadline to get rid of dodgy backburner, and the custom scripting part sounds good to me.

[tiw]

We have a series of tools for sending renders and processing data. The main tool is called ‘RenderPal’ (please note absolutely no relation to renderpal.com, it is a name we came up with some time ago and it has just stuck)

So RenderPal is used to send still images and animations. It is built to be used as a one click render-aid that our artists can use. It does a lot, but just as an example if someone wants to render a still image, it will send out a calc pass then the main render as tiles. The tiles are then stitched together and then finally processed into a PSD file (with all selections and passes) using a custom Photoshop Deadline plugin we made. It also has things like error checking built in to spot common mistakes that people might make. We have multiple other scripts that integrate with RenderPal that allow for things like multiple camera renderings, sending out multiple renders for lights (to allow lighting to be changed in post), processing model libraries on our farm etc.

Anyway the point is that Deadline has full access to pretty much anything through scripts. Any time I get stuck on something the support is amazing. They usually answer questions within a few hours and if you report bugs they get fixed quickly too. Cannot say enough good things about them.

[Ramsay]

So RenderPal is used to send still images and animations. It is built to be used as a one click render-aid that our artists can use. It does a lot, but just as an example if someone wants to render a still image, it will send out a calc pass then the main render as tiles. The tiles are then stitched together and then finally processed into a PSD file (with all selections and passes) using a custom Photoshop Deadline plugin we made.

That's pretty cool! Things have obviously moved on since I worked at Designstor years ago Did you create that plugin with C++?

[tiw]

Hey Craig!

The Deadline plugin is written in Python and Photoshop is scripted through .jsx and a droplet.
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