Is anyone aware of any documentation on extended commands for backburner?
Is it possible to tell backburner when a task is complete, or when the monitor suspends a task and thus to break what it is doing?
For context:
I’m trying to send some files to the farm to process, and naturally I don’t want the farm to submit other tasks to these machines.
Ideally if I suspend the task, I’d like to be able to identify and deal with that.
But more importantly, when my script is complete, I’d like to send back to Monitor that the task is complete, as naturally it is trying to render a task instead.
Or am I just better off telling it to render some arbitrary 1×1 image?
what kind of script are you trying to run to do what ? if it is a batch script you should look up cmdjob.exe for custom (non-render) jobs. if it is a maxscript you may need to create a very small render and use a pre-render callback
I’ve got a whole bunch of scripts.
Currently my flow is this:
Import a 3d file
save .max
cultivate and merge like geometry
split for texel size and unwrap models
bake each texture
apply textures to ambient channel of all models
export .dae
save file
While I can do this all locally ,we’re trying to expand this overnight to allow us to queue up dozens of files and have multiple workstations process them.
You can’t save a max file in backburner mode, it needs to be in workstation mode.
For all these things you really need to look at something a bit better than Backburner… every time I see someone struggling I think back to those days of frustration… Move to Deadline, you won’t look back!
Can you automate task submission in Deadline?
I’m just starting to read further into it now, so I apologize if this is in the reference materials.
you can use cmdjob.exe to send a custom job which launches 3dsmax and your script from the command line so you can still use backburner but it will only work on machines with a licensed copy of max (ie workstations) so you should specify the servers. you may need to send one job for each file or a job list may work for you. check out cmdjob.exe in the help and/or run it in a cmd window to get help there
Are you sure about that ?
I’m sending jobs to the backburner with preRenderScript set to a specific mxs file of mine, and I’m pretty sure that all the mxs command are performed, licensed node or not.
What kind of scripts are you processing?
Anything with file I/O beyond the cmd task does NOT process here.
But if I log onto a machine and provide it with the cmdjob itself then it loads Max and processes fine.
But when sending through backburner it comes back as complete but shows no sign of having done the requested work.
The deadline submitter is almost entirely maxscript based and the files are not encypted so you can customise it to however you like, on the forum you’ll find a simplified maxscript submitter.
Well, for instance, I’ve written an alternative to 3dsmax’s IFL format, we had some issues over here.
The tool uses the #preRenderEval callback to update a lot of bitmap paths.
As the first tries were not very effective, I also used this #preRenderEval to log what the tool was processing (mesh names, material names, bitmap paths, etc), writing all the output somewhere on the network at each frame (using the 3dsmax “FileStream Values”).
But now that I read you again I got it, what you mean by file I/O is not Filestream Values, but 3dsmax’s saveMaxFile
Good to know.
Thanks for the information, I appreciate some knowledge sharing on the matter.
We’ve got some custom stuff going on with regards to render to texture, and have purchased a wonderful unwrapping plug-in. We’ve managed to do everything wonderfully on a local machine, and have only gotten it to work on a “farm” machine when sent to Deadline and forced workstation mode.
So even scripts as simple as “load file A, create box, save as file B” yields no results in headless form.