Just thinking out-loud here…
I am fed up with using the antiquated Backburner and Batch render, and deadline seems to be geared towards huge studios with massive render farms, I would love to see a bit of render management software from Chaos Group - even if it were sold seperately I think it would be worth it. Especially if it gave more control over DR.
Hi Macker 
I can’t but second this … BackBurner is stone-aged, is no longer (seriously) updated 
and Batch Render is … well … Batch Render ! I’m currently heavily searching for a robust alternative to it, but I found only half-functional ones on ScriptSpot. I already asked sometimes ago if Chaos could develop something for that, because we have big needs for batch rendering. I’m even thinking about developping one myself, but I can hardly find the time !
Well, in a nutshell … +1 to your wish
+1 for Deadline, large or small its ideal. Just download the free 2 machine version and see for yourself. If you like then invest. V7 is due end of year, I’m beta testing at the moment. I cant recommend it enough. Last used backburner 6+ years ago!! Its not that expensive unless you have a lot of machines to buy for in one hit, and it will save you the hours back in under a year.
The thing is I’m not after something incredibly complex, just a small plugin/program that can schedule multiple renders, maybe even state sets or whatever they’re called now… And a way of managing DR for multiple people from one place.
A common issue that we have at our office is that I’ll be using our render nodes through DR to get some images rendered out as quickly as possible, and half way through one of the renders one of my colleagues will need to use the nodes. Obviously we’d want to split them so we have an equal amount of rendering power each - but that would mean cancelling my render, or waiting until completion which sometimes can be hours. There needs to be a proper way of assigning render nodes to users, and being able to cancel them mid-job.
It’s not good enough to say “just restart the spawner service”, because it’s 50/50 which job it will pick up when it’s restarted. It might pick up the new job, or it might pick up my current job! A small program that gives artists the ability to say to nodes “only accept jobs from x” or something would be perfect.
I have a DR spawner job on low priority running during the day, interruptable, so any render that goes to Deadline with a higher priority, the dr job gets stops there and then, and starts the frames. You could have two jobs so 50% of machine cannot be interrupted.
We don’t use deadline.
This is a different issue. You can’t have more than one person send a job to a node via DR. It will only tackle one job at a time. Not to mention the RAM implications if two jobs are loaded at once.
Again, Deadline will allow multiple slaves to run on the same machine, so if you have a beast then you can share resources. But I can see your not interested in Deadline, just a simple script.
Deadline is crap. Lets avoid it 
Constructive!
Well simple is better than essay worth of explanation. Lets just say I used it for 1.5 year and I am a lot more happier with BB.
You went back from *insert anything* to BB and prefer it? Holy what the f*ck!
Yeah the amount of problems I had with Deadline is just not worth it. At least in my current work. Its also a lot easier to deal with amazon EC2 servers when I use BB.
EC2 and alike is out of question due to security restrictions here. But BB is just so insanely limiting. It has served us pretty well despite all the hate. Especially given the loads of obs we threw and throw at it. But beyond 1000 Jobs things get really messy.
Cheers,
Thorsten
Strange. I also used Deadline and I cannot imagine anyone being happy with BB in comparison.
What we need and Autodesk isn’t capable of:
You have subset system that does that no ?
try re-queuing a frame from bb. Good luck
We’re using BB for a while now, but if there would be some kind of render farm manager from Chaosgroup I would be first in line to get it.
For now I’ve wrote a tool that bypasses standard job submission to BB. It automates most of the annoying things. Creates folders, adds render outputs based on file name and checks for some mistakes like scene added with DR turned on or region render. Saved us hours of work.
Best,
Tomasz
We have pushed BB beyond its Limits. And i am actually astonished at how far we could push it. But things get very flakey beyond 1000 jobs. This does not even cut it for 3D for us anymore. 2D was migrated to qube a while back and while 2D also worked pretty okay on BB to certain limits it would simply break these days. We’re typically running tens of thousands of jobs these days.
Cheers,
Thorsten
Interesting. Still I’m impressed. It’s getting a bit annoying with 50-100 jobs a day for us. I was thinking about deadline, but I don’t have time for now to correctly test it.
How many artists did use BB when it became unbearable ?
Best,
Tomasz