We are still struggling with BB2014 trying to get an automated task to run reliably when a render ends. So far haven’t found a solution but, while trying different workarounds, I’ve stumbled with the Backburner “DropBox” folder. Unfortunately haven’t found any documentation or example on how it works.
What I've figured so far is that when you place there a xml job file, generated by "3dsmaxcmd.exe dropme.max -writeJobFile", BB picks it up and adds it to the render queue. With a couple modifications to the xml file I've managed to make the job dependent to another job, so maybe I could use this to get a script executed when the other job ends. But I can't get the job file to render, the message in BB log is something like:
2014/01/10 11:46:07 ERR Job 'dropme' (#$$??$$##) failed for render-slave01
2014/01/10 11:46:08 ERR Error message: 3dsmax adapter error : Could not locate .
...
2014/01/10 11:46:36 ERR Job 'dropme' (#$$??$$##) failed for xrender-slave02
2014/01/10 11:46:37 ERR Error message: Could not locate C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\backburner\ServerJob\dropme.max
It seems that it’s trying to find a scene file to no avail. I’ve noticed that BB also pick any zip file with the same name as the job xml (i.e: dropme.zip), tried to place the max file inside the zip but it doesn’t seem to work.
All I need is a reliable way to fire a script when a task ends, and I'm hopping that attaching a script to the dependent task we'll get that, but maybe I could use this feature in another way to get the job done?
Anyone here knows how to work with the DropBox folder or has any idea how could I get it to do what I need?
Knowing how to work with this feature could be very handy for many other batch render tasks. It’s weird that it’s so hard to find information about this.