Deadline for Nuke

Render Farm Preparation

Before you go about submitting your project to the render farm, consider these points:

• IMPORTANT: Organize your files. Keep yours assets (movie files, image sequences, etc) all in one spot, with your nuke project file in the topmost folder(.nk), with comprehensive names and an organized folder structure. All your files must in folders located under the Nuke project file.
  

• Remove spaces and special characters (<>:"/\|?*) from folders and file name. (<>:"/\|?*) and other special characters can interfere with how a file name is "read" by the computer, so it is best to avoid them entirely. Limit file names to alphanumeric characters (abc, 123, etc).
  

• Save revisions of your scene.
  

• Keep file names under 256 characters.

• Do not render in jpeg's. Jpeg uses lossy compression, meaning it does not retain all the data in your image. It also degrades every time you save it. Use png's or exr's (or any other format that is lossless).

Submitting a Job

Step One - Login to your personal account or PCoIP

• Click on "Other User" and login to your personal account, using your myEC credentials (first initial lastname, myEC password).
• You can submit to the Render Farm over PCoIP. See How to access the Remote PC's (PCoIP) for instructions.

Step Two - Prepare Project for the render farm

• Make sure all of your files are in one location. Create a folder structure with a topmost project folder with your nuke project file (.nk) and a folder for your footage.
• Once your footage is organized and in a location under your nuke project file, open your project and go to the project settings ("s" hotkey). Once there, press the Script Directory button next to the project directory field. This changes your asset references from absolute paths to relative paths and allows you to move your project without breaking your references. All assets will be relative to your nuke project file.

Render Drive location in Windows Explorer

Step Three - Copy All Project Materials To Render Drive.

• Make a folder for your project on Render (R:). (no spaces)
• Copy your project file and all necessary asset files into your folder on the Render Drive.
• Refer to the images on the right of the page for clarification.

Step Four - Open Project From Render Drive to Verify References, Paths & Render Settings

• Once your files have successfully copied to R:\, open your comp from this location.
• Verify that all project files and textures are pointing to the proper, relative locations on R:\ & that all referenced files have indeed been copied to the render drive. Any project files on C:\ or S:\ will cause your render to error.
• In your write node, ensure that your output is also set relative to your root folder on R:\.
• In your write node, ensure that you have selected an image sequence output, rather than a video file like .mov or .avi (the latter are not supported by network rendering).
• Check that your file padding is appropriate (filename_####.png).

Example render settings

Step Five - After making any changes ensure that you re-save the file to R:\.

Step Six - Submit Job from Nuke using Thinkbox dropdow

• With your project open, click on the Thinkbox menu at the top of the screen and select Submit Nuke to Deadline. This will launch a separate Deadline submission dialogue that contains your job details auto-filled based on project settings & best practice defaults.
  • If the submit option is not there, you can make a request to a technician/IT to add it into Nuke, or you can submit via Deadline Monitor in the Submit > 2D/Compositing menu.
• Rename your job something descriptive, to keep your renders organized. Consider using scene and shot numbers.
• Enter your frame list.
• Double check that your scene file & project directories are correct & relative to R:\.
• Hit the "OK" button.

Deadline Submission Window

Step Six - Manage your job

Once the job has been submitted, you can open the Deadline application "Monitor" to keep track of your job and about other activity on the farm. To open Monitor, you can find it in the start menu under "Network Rendering", it has a green computer monitor as an icon.

Deadline Monitor

• From here you can keep track of your render. The left panel is a list of all the jobs currently rendering and completed. If you click on your job, the panel on the right will let you know information about each frame.
• Within 30 seconds your job should change from ‘queued’ to ‘rendering’, unless there is a long queue on the farm.
• Your job may gather (many) errors, but most errors are a computer that tried to pick up your job but was unable to render because it was missing a plugin or was interrupted by someone needing to use that computer.
• If your job does not begin after a few minutes or gathers many errors without making progress, double check your image paths and render output and make sure they all are on the R:\ drive.
• Notice a particular computer is consistently messing up your render? You can right-click on a frame rendered by the culprit and select "Requeue Tasks by *computer name*". A dialogue box with a checkbox will come up and ask if you want to blacklist the computer. Click the checkbox and hit "OK" and all tasks previously rendered by that computer will be redone, and that computer will be prevented from rendering your job again. If this happens, please email us at animtech@ecuad.ca so we can take a look at that computer.
• Do not delete jobs, we can use the error reports to troubleshoot what may be wrong with your render.

Step Seven - Retrieve your files

• Once your job is completed, you can retrieve your files from the project folder on the Render Drive.
  • If you are on PCoIP, you can transfer your image sequence over OneDrive, or simply use the PCoIP computer to create a video that you can more easily transfer to OneDrive or upload to moodle, Youtube, Vimeo, etc. . Make sure to back up your work.
• Please delete your rendered images and project folder once you are absolutely sure you don't need them anymore and have them backed up in other locations. We need to keep the Render Farm clean and tidy in order to ensure it runs smoothly. All files will be deleted from the Render Drive in May.

Failed Jobs

If your render is slow or producing undesirable results, you can halt your process in one of a couple ways:

Right click:

• Suspend - This will pause the current job, but allow frames that are currently rendering to finish.

• Fail Job - This will pause the current job, stopping all rendering frames.

Please only manage/modify your own jobs.
Do not delete jobs, we can use the error reports to troubleshoot what may be wrong with your render.

Main Reasons Render Jobs Fail

The 5 most common network rendering errors in order of frequency

1. Files and folders are not properly placed in the R:\ Render Drive. This is by far the most common error. Please check your textures to make sure they are in the right location. This is managed much more easily if you have a properly set up project folder.
   
2. Incorrect project paths, even if your files are in the correct place (e.g. the texture paths in your scene have C:\ instead of R:\).
3. Missing project files, especially textures.
4. Missing plugins/scripts: Emily Carr must own all the plugins you are using , or be able to download them for free! Cracked plugins will not work!
5.  Inefficiently or bizarrely constructed scene files. Too many lights or needlessly complicated scene geometry are common mistakes.
   

If the job keeps failing after you’ve ruled out all these things, please email animtech@ecuad.ca