Spawner Monitor?

[atrask@hksinc.com]

I use about 20 machines as spawners shared between three artists and it's always a hassle to see which ones are actually working. A lot of times a few will randomly drop out and I'll have to dig through the vray message window while the scene is rendering to see what's going on.

So how difficult would it be to have a monitor window that tells me which machines are currently accepting connections from vray? And going further, would there be a way to assign spawners to specific artist's machines? Or at least see who's got what spawners rendering their shot at the moment?

I'm curious about thoughts on this. If someone can point me in the right direction on how to write something like this (or if it already exists) I'm all ears!

Thanks,
Andrew

[3LP]

Refamo is a awesome tool that would be a good start

Stan

[Oleg_Budeanu]

Well still waiting for ThinkBox guys to make that dynamic DBR offload , but looks like it will not happen even in 8-th version of Deadline.
Don't know a solution for this one yet really , though it is quite weird for me , looks that it should be easy to implement.

[3LP]

We have over 50 nodes that are spread out over 6 artists and we have no issue managing them.
As I said, refamo and a couple of max scripts and your good to go

Stan

[Oleg_Budeanu]

Deleted. You can try Refamo i think. 3LP , does it have capability of controlling distributed rendering ? Or that is done manually by turning on/off the process/service ?

What i mean is not a setup where you have 1-2 main servers with DR nodes listed on it.
I mean when you have 30 PC's and you are sending a job with DR on , and controlling nodes in process - turning them on or off when it is needed, swapping them between tasks and that kind of stuff. Is Refamo capable of doing that ?

[atrask@hksinc.com]

...and controlling nodes in process - turning them on or off when it is needed, swapping them between tasks and that kind of stuff. Is Refamo capable of doing that ?

This is what I want. I'm trying out Refamo now, it's a cool way to monitor the load on your machines, restart, wake, etc. But I don't see any sort of way to do what we're looking for of the box. I see that you can send custom commands to the machines. 3LP, is this what you mean by 'and a couple of max scrips'? What scripts?

[3LP]

Hi guys,
To interact with the nodes from 3ds we use a custom script I wrote few years ago who is pretty easy TBH :



This divides the nodes into predefined pools that the artist choose before sending his job.
That was developed before chaosgroup enabled to swap nodes at render times.

Basically they shout out : "who is spawning? Ok, on what pool? ok I'll take the 70's then"
Or just looking on refamo what's used or not, it's pretty obvious when you see a pool in red or in green.

Since this spawner script works well for us, it's really rarely needed to redistribute nodes during render, but I'm guessing a couple of simple *.bat files will make that possible.
Since CG has enabled the hot swapping of nodes you're only a few clicks away from re-assigning dynamically and on the fly all the nodes to a specific user, either locally or remotely through refamo with those few simple bat files.

Make sense?
Stan

[atrask@hksinc.com]

This is incredible, thank you! The concept makes total sense.