effects animation

I’m writing some pipeline pieces these days, which is quite some fun! I wanted to automate sending FFX jobs to simulate on the farm, and it turns out it’s very easy to write a deadline submission tool for it, using SMTDSettings and SMTDFunctions that Deadline provides. It’s basically doing this:

• check if there’s a single FFX selected. I’ll expand on batch submitting next.
• closes the FFX UI and deselects it
• closes the render scene dialog
• backs up the render scene dialog settings – render range type, resolution
• sets the render range to single frame, the resolution to 25×25
• sets the backburner mode of the FFX to “true”
• sets the Deadline job name to the scene name, plus a FFX sim tag, plus the FFX name
• submits the job to Deadline
• sets the backburner mode back to “false”
• restores the render settings
• confirms and prints out the job name to the user

So, quite basic and quite useful! I’ll expand it with batch job submit for more FFX grids, dependant render job after they are all simmed, simulation progress bar update in Deadline, and, of course, bugfixes 🙂 You can get the file below. Cheers!

SMTDFFX_v01.ms