Command Line Option to Bring Player to the Foreground When Using --attach

[Joelaff]

The ability to --attach and add a layer to an existing Player is very cool. It would be nice if there was another option to decide if we wanted Player to also come to the foreground.

I would add both of these variants to our Deadline Viewer command so we could do it either way.

Speaking of Deadline. It would be WAAAY cool if you guys could work with the Thinkbox folks to have the 3ds Max Submitter (SMTD) automatically generate a little script or command line to load all the jigsaw layers into Player with their respective positions. In other words, when using the Deadline/Jigsaw feature to split up a render into tiled chunks it would let you load all of these up in Player and auto-update as the various piece were rendered, using the auto-scan for updates.

[yolov]

Hmm, --attach is supposed to bring Player to the foreground I'll make a note to check if there's something wrong there.
Although I'm familiar with tiled rendering, I'm not really familiar with jigsaw/deadline - can you tell me if the tiles are always the same size (i.e. the image is split into even pieces) or some tiles can be smaller/larger than others?

[Joelaff]

On my system I am not seeing the player come to the foreground when I do an attach. Honestly, a switch would be idea because they we could send various layers without it coming to the front every time by having a option to send and bring forward or just send (attach).

Well, the Deadline thing is actually very versatile and does all kinds of stuff that would be cumbersome to accommodate. I think it would be kind of hard to parse even the basic tiled grid unless you simply went of the region name and the user then selected the width tile count. Dealine saves the files with names like MyShot_139_region_2_.1156.exr Where you see region_2, however, you have no info on the total number of regions. Maybe this is just a pipe dream. They offer a command line utility, draft, which assembles everything back together for you automatically, but not until all the regions are done. Say you divided an image into a grid of 3x3 (9) regions. It would be cool to be able to view the portions that have been rendered and reload the new frames as they fished.

https://www.awsthinkbox.com/blog/jig...e-introduction

[yolov]

I've logged --attach not bringing Player to front as a bug. There's a separate --attach_nf flag that specifically does not bring it to the foreground. We'll have a look at it.

I'll make a note to dig a bit into the jigsaw feature. We'll need to have a way of knowing which tile goes where. Maybe it's something we can work out.

[Joelaff]

Thanks. I know the jigsaw thing may be a big undertaking, but thanks for looking at the attach stuff.

[Joelaff]

Oh, one more kinda big issue (perhaps needs another thread, but maybe not)...

Chaos Player often has trouble playing at any decent frame rate when rendering in the background (on the latest Threadripper HW). Most other plays seem to handle this (DJV or MPC for instance). Would be nice if maybe you could up the playback thread priority or something. ??

Thanks..

[yolov]

There are plans to further improve performance.
Though, what do you mean by rendering in the background?

[Joelaff]

I mean when I have VRay rendering in the VFB and I switch over Chaos Player to check something else out it plays slowly. Whereas other players are able to play smoothly in these cases.

[Joelaff]

Is there some way to force a sequence to load as a sparse sequence (like a sparse array in programming). For instance if I have rendered frames 1,2,3,4, and 10 out of a ten frame animation I would like it to load that up and play frames 1,2,3,4, and then black for frames 5,6,7,8,9, and then frame 10. Rather than removing frames 5,6,7,8,9, and skipping straight to ten.

I thought it was doing that before, but it is definitely not doing it.

When we render, we render the first and last frames of a sequence and the initial frames rendered. This way compositing apps can load in the whole sequence, and then get updated as the frames are available.

Thanks.

[Joelaff]

One more thing on the attach feature. Right now --attach only attaches to a running process. If Chaos Player is not already running it will not start it. It would be nice if we had the option to start a new process if one is not already running (or make that the default, as nobody would execute with --attache and NOT want to have Chaos Player open).

Thanks.

[yolov]

Is there some way to force a sequence to load as a sparse sequence (like a sparse array in programming). For instance if I have rendered frames 1,2,3,4, and 10 out of a ten frame animation I would like it to load that up and play frames 1,2,3,4, and then black for frames 5,6,7,8,9, and then frame 10. Rather than removing frames 5,6,7,8,9, and skipping straight to ten.

I thought it was doing that before, but it is definitely not doing it.

When we render, we render the first and last frames of a sequence and the initial frames rendered. This way compositing apps can load in the whole sequence, and then get updated as the frames are available.

Thanks.

This has been requested. I'll add your vote to it.

[yolov]

One more thing on the attach feature. Right now --attach only attaches to a running process. If Chaos Player is not already running it will not start it. It would be nice if we had the option to start a new process if one is not already running (or make that the default, as nobody would execute with --attache and NOT want to have Chaos Player open).

Thanks.

It used to work recently, I'll have to check when it broke. Thanks for the report.