VFX

Deadline is a hassle-free administration and rendering toolkit for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX based render farms. It offers a world of flexibility and a wide-range of management options for render farms of all sizes, and supports over 40 different rendering packages out of the box.

The latest version of the render queue management system offers a variety of work flow improvements, helping you streamline your production pipeline. Updated Monitor options allow artists to save their layout presets and the new slave availability filter helps them troubleshoot their jobs faster. Farm administration is made easier with increased security for authenticating Deadline users and streamlined configuration options improve system roll out times.

Rock-steady Operation:

Deadline’s unique architecture removes the need for a centralized manager application by using File Sharing to manage the farm. As long as your server machine is running, Deadline® is running.

Intuitive User Interface:

Built with your creativity in mind, Deadline’s UI has evolved in response to extensive feedback from artists. Instead of web pages, mysterious elite terminology or strange multi-platform UI widgets, there is a single, integrated Monitor UI.

For job submission, Deadline® offers integrated submission dialogs for 3ds Max, After Effects, Blender, Cinema 4D, Composite, Fusion, Generation, Houdini, Lightwave, Maya, Modo, Nuke, RealFlow, Rhino, Softimage, and Vue, providing a comfortable native environment for cross-application tasks.

Customizable and Scriptable:

With its Python based plug-in api, studios can customize the out of the box plug-ins and scripts to suit their individual pipelines, or create custom plug-in support in-house applications. Event plug-ins can be created to trigger events like updating pipeline tools when jobs are submitted or finish rendering. Finally, job scripts can be created to perform operations when a job starts, when a job finishes, and before and after each task is rendered.

Flexible Job Scheduling:

Use numeric job priorities, machine groups and pools, and job-specific machine lists to explicitly control distribution of rendering resources among multiple departments. Limits allow you to handle both limited license plug-ins and render packages, while job dependencies and scheduling allow you to control when your jobs will begin rendering.

Launch and configure an arbitrary number of Slaves on a single machine. Each Slave instance can be given a unique name, and can be assigned its own list of pools and groups, which allows Slaves to work on separate jobs. A single high performance machine can process multiple 3D, compositing, and simulation jobs simultaneously.

Notifications

Deadline can be configured to notify users of job completion or failure through either an automatic instant message notification or an e-mail notification to any number of watching users.

Administrators can also configure Deadline to notify them with information about Power Management, stalled slaves, licensing issues, and other issues that may arise on the farm.

Statistics Gathering:

Deadline can be configured to store job and render farm statistics in the Repository, or in an existing Postgres database. Using a Postgres database allows studios to write their own queries to gather the information they need. Any existing Deadline statistics currently stored in the repository can be easily imported into the database. In addition, if the database goes offline, Deadline will write the statistics to the repository so that they can be imported into the database when it is available again.

Shotgun Integration:

Deadline integrates with Shotgun to enable a seamless render and review data flow. When Deadline starts a render, a version is automatically created in Shotgun with key metadata. When the render is complete, Deadline updates Shotgun with a thumbnail image, paths to frames, render stats, and playback links. Shotgun then dispatches targeted notifications with links back to the work. Studios can view versions in various contexts, create reports, and organize work into playlists for review sessions where they can quickly take notes with the Shotgun Note App.