Brainstorm - VFB Zoom Control on Render Farm Machines

[simplychen]

Greetings folks,

I will be making a similar post on Thinkbox's forum as well, but thought to see if there are others from here who can offer alternative ways to achieve what I am looking for.

Situation

• Due to the varying type of work we do, we alter our output sizes quite often (as one would expect). Because of this, when jobs were submitted into Deadline, we often find ourselves looking at VFB zoomed in when remoting into the render machine(s) to check progress. I understand that's what the F keybind is made for to zoom extent/fit to VFB, but I'd like to find a way to automate that process (i know it's just a trivial key press, but i digress).

Ideas

• Is it possible to set up a pre-frame or pre-load script to automate this in Deadline?
• Whether we can do this through Deadline or not, is this particular zoom control exposed via Maxscript?
• Is there a ini file for the VFB that I can modify to force zoom level?

All suggestions are welcome, but understandable if it's something we just need to hit a key for.


Thanks all,

[Joelaff]

What if you use Deadline's ability to render smaller regions. I believe you can set them up to render a cropped region (rather than with negative space around it), and to use Draft after the render to re-assemble it into a bigger image. That way your entire render would be the region itself.

[^Lele^]

Greetings folks,

I will be making a similar post on Thinkbox's forum as well, but thought to see if there are others from here who can offer alternative ways to achieve what I am looking for.

Situation

• Due to the varying type of work we do, we alter our output sizes quite often (as one would expect). Because of this, when jobs were submitted into Deadline, we often find ourselves looking at VFB zoomed in when remoting into the render machine(s) to check progress. I understand that's what the F keybind is made for to zoom extent/fit to VFB, but I'd like to find a way to automate that process (i know it's just a trivial key press, but i digress).

Ideas

• Is it possible to set up a pre-frame or pre-load script to automate this in Deadline?
• Whether we can do this through Deadline or not, is this particular zoom control exposed via Maxscript?
• Is there a ini file for the VFB that I can modify to force zoom level?

All suggestions are welcome, but understandable if it's something we just need to hit a key for.


Thanks all,

Unfortunately, there is nothing currently in MXS that allows to control zooming/panning of the VFB, nor is there a file-based version of the control.
It could be possible to use some macrorecording tool in windows to ensure the VFB gets zoomed to fit on remote connection (by macro-pressing the F key, essentially.), but that'd be down to the macro tool's ability to detect said remote connection, and that's definitely not a given.

[simplychen]

Thanks all for the response. I'll try a few things based on your replies.

[uplink3d]

Hi, I'd like to express my wish for the default zoom in VFB to not be at 100%... I recently upgraded from v4 to v6 and that is a very frustrating. I send renderings to another machine, and like to keep an eye on progress. Now I have to roll across the office, grab mouse, click in window, hit F key, roll back to my workstation. I used to just turn my head 30 degrees... I suppose it'll get me more exercise! Can't understand why zoom @ 100% would be the desired default. Fit to Screen seems logical to me, and that's how it always showed up in v4. I, also, was hoping there would be an ini file that could be modified.

[^Lele^]

The wish has been logged as an improvement, as VMAX-12869.