Submitting Jobs To Your Deadline Render Farm

Blog

Feb 24, 2017

Version: Deadline 8.0

INTRODUCTION

You've just finished installing Deadline, and now you would like to give the farm a spin by submitting some render jobs. Where do you start? The first thing you need to do is locate the job submitter you want to use. Some submitters are already in place (the Monitor submitters), while others needs to be installed (the Integrated submitters). Here we are going to go over the different types of submitters and how you would go about setting them up.

TYPES OF SUBMITTERS

The Monitor submitters are already in place and ready to use, and are available for every Application Plugin that ships with Deadline. They can be found in the Submit menu in the Monitor, and they allow you to submit jobs using any scene or project files that you have access to. Note that these submitters can also be found in the Launcher menu. (Are they still technically Monitor submitters then? Oh well, moving on...)

Here is an example of a Monitor submitter.

The Integrated submitters can be launched directly from within many of your favorite content creation applications. One of the main benefits of using the Integrated submitters is that they have direct access to the data within your scene or project file. They can pull data like frame lists, output paths, resolution, etc, and automatically submit that information with the job. They can also do more advanced operations, like submit individual jobs per render pass or camera, set up dependency chains, or support Jigsaw for advanced multi-region rendering.

Here is an example of an Integrated submitter.

Note that the Integrated submitters are not available for every content creation application that Deadline supports. In many cases, the application simply doesn't have the scripting capabilities required to create one. In addition, some Integrated submitters provide more functionality than others. Check out the Supported Software documentation to see which applications have Integrated Submission listed under their Highlighted Features.

INSTALLING THE INTEGRATED SUBMITTERS

Before you can use an Integrated submitter though, it must first be installed. The easiest way is to use the Integrated submitter installers that are included with the Deadline Repository installation.

If you have direct access to the Repository folder, simply open the submission folder, then the folder for the application you are using (Maya, Nuke, etc), and finally the Installers folder. Here, you will find the installers for each operating system that the application supports. If your application doesn't have a folder in the submission folder, that means it doesn't have an Integrated submitter.

If you do not have direct access to the Repository folder (because you don't have permissions or you are connected via a Proxy Server), then you can use the Monitor to download the installers to your machine. In the Monitor, open the Tools menu and select Download Integrated Submission Scripts to bring up the Submission Scripts window. Simply choose your application(s) and a location to download them to, and then press the OK button.

Once you have the installer you need, you can run it to install the submitter for each version of the application that is installed on your machine.

For example, if you have Maya 2014, 2016, 2016.5, and 2017 all installed on your machine, the Maya submitter installer can install for all four versions at once.

It is also possible to silently install the submitters using the command line. You can see which command line options are available by running the installer from a command prompt or terminal and passing it the--help command. On Windows, you'll see this window come up (on Linux and Mac OS X, the information will be shown in the terminal).

Using this information, you can install the Maya submitter for all versions of Maya on your machine by running the following command:

Maya-submitter-windows-installer.exe --mode unattended

You could also explicitly specify which versions of the application you want to install the submitter for. For example, if you have 3ds Max 2015, 2016 and 2017 installed, and you don't want to install the submitter for 3ds Max 2015, you could run this command:

3dsmax-submitter-windows-installer.exe --mode unattended --disable-components 3dsMax2015

By using these command line options, you are able to customize which Integrated submitters you install easily. We have already shown here how to install a single Integrated submitter, but if you want to install submitters for multiple applications at the same time, you can simplify the process by using batch or shell scripts. This is an example batch script that will install the submitters for Nuke (all versions), Cinema 4D (R17 and R18 only), and Houdini 15 (which requires a specific directory for installation):

@echo off
Nuke-submitter-windows-installer.exe --mode unattended
Cinema4D-submitter-windows-installer.exe --mode unattended
--enable-components C4DR17,C4DR17
Houdini-submitter-windows-installer.exe --mode unattended
--enable-components Houdini15
--destDir2015 "C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 15.5.480"

You can then run this batch file on every artist workstation to roll out the submitters easily. Note that in this case, the batch script and the installers must all be in the same folder.

Finally, it is also possible to manually install the Integrated submitters without using the installers. Instructions for installing the Integrated submitters manually can be found in the Application Plugins documentation.

WRAPPING UP

Now that your submitters are ready to go, you can take the next step and actually submit some jobs to the farm! You can find additional information about each application's submitter by reading through the Application Plugins documentation.

If you would like to learn more about job submission in general, check out the Submitting Jobs and Manual Job Submission sections of the documentation.