Thanks Greg - that does kinda make sense....
To answer a couple of your points....
Greg Ercolano wrote:
Also, rush supports a lot of renderers.. many don't show percent
completion messages, so it wouldn't be universally deployable.
And finally some renders (mental ray) goes through the zero-to-100
percent progress potentially several times, depending on how many
passes it has.
My thinking here would be that Rush would require some kind of wrapper
around the application to convert the application's progress reports
into something that makes more sense to Rush. Pretty much in the same
way that Alfred does it. I work mainly with Shake, and if I've, say, got
5 frames rendering on each render machine, the wrapper script would
translate Shake saying that frame 1/5 is 50% complete to telling rush
that the whole box is 10% complete. Alfred ignores any output from the
application except for lines that look something like "ALF_PROGRESS 23%"
You could, potentially, write wrapper scripts for the more common
renderers that Rush supports, and if users wanted to get progress
information for others, I'm sure they'd be capable of writing a small
wrapper script.
Your example of Mental Ray, again, would fall into the same camp as
Shake - the wrapper script could (I don't know MR, so I don't know how
easy this would be) know how many passes are coming out, and so turn
each 0-100% progress into a subset of the whole progress for that box.
The current way to monitor progress in real time is to get an idea
of the average time it takes frames to render (see the 'ELAPSED'
times in the 'Frames' report, or the 'average render time' in the
'Frames Info' report), and then put the Frames button on 'repeat'
(Hit "REP", then hit "Frames"), and then monitor the ELAPSED times
for the busy frames to see how fast things are going.
My current issue with this is that the render farm picks up all of my
frames at the same time (well, clumps of 5 frames), and they all take
about the same length of time. So the progress information that I get
stays at 0% for the length of the render, and then suddenly jumps to
100% at the end.
Thanks, though - it's good to know that I wasn't missing anything too
obvious.
--
Hugh Macdonald
Rainmaker UK
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