1. Qube
2. Copy of Submitting a 3DSMax Job

Copy of Submitting a 3DSMax Job

Name
This is the name of the job of the job so it can be easily identified in the Qube! UI.

Priority
Every job in Qube is assigned a numeric priority. Priority 1 is higher than priority 100. This is similar to 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place, etc. The default priority assigned to a job is 9999.

Instances
This is the number of copies of the application that will run at the same time across the network. The combination of "Instances=1" and "Max Instances=-1" means that this job will take as much of the farm as it can, and all jobs will share evenly across the farm.

Examples:

On a 12 slot(core) machine running Maya if you set
"Instances" to 4
"Reservations" to "host.processors=3"
Qube! will open 4 sessions of Maya on the Worker(s) simultaneously, which may consume all slots/cores on a given Worker.

if you set
"Instances" to 1
"Reservations" to "host.processors=1+"
Qube will open 1 session of Maya on a Worker, consuming all slots/cores ("host.processors=1+" is used for all slots/cores).

Max Instances
If resources are available, Qube! will spawn more than 'Instances' copies of the application, but no more than 'Max Instances'. The default of -1 means there is no maximum. If this is set to 0, then it won't spawn more than 'Instances' copies.

More on Instances & Reservations & SmartShare Studio Defaults

Range  

Frame range for the job (e.g 1-100, or 1-100x3, or 1,3,7,10). Most jobs require a frame range to execute on the Workers. You can set this range in a few different ways :

• "1-100" will just render the range between 1 and 100
• "1-100x3" will render every 3rd frame in the range 1 to 100; 1, 4, 7, ..., 94, 97, 100
• "1,3,7,10" will only render the selected frames 1,3,7,10

rangeOrdering
Order to render the items. (Ascending=1,2,3,4,5...,Descending=10,9,8...,Binary=first,middle,last...) You can set the order in which your frames are rendered. The drop down options are:

• "Ascending" - this will render the frames counting upwards from your start frame
• "Decending" - this will render the frames counting backwards from your end frame
• "Binary" - This will render the first, last, and middle frames of the range, then the middle frame of the first half and the middle frame of the second half, and so on. This is useful for sampling the frames in the sequence to make sure it is rendering correctly.

Use Preview Frames  

Enabling preview frames will create 2 jobs:

• A primary dependent job with a higher priority that will render the selected frames first 
• A secondary job with lower priority that will render the remaining frames. This will return the selected frames faster so that you can check the accuracy of your renders.

Frame Numbers

Choose the frames that you wish to render first. If left blank the default is to render the first frame, the last frame and the middle frame in that order. You can select specific frames by adding comma separated frame numbers e.g 1,2,10,15,75, or a range with, e.g., 1-100x5 (1 to 100, every 5th frame)

Preview Priority

Choose the priority for the preview job. This can be set by the site admin.

Preview Subjobs

Choose the number of instances / subjobs for the preview frames. By default, this is equal to the number of preview frames - that is, it will try to do all the preview frames at the same time.

Note that when you submit a job with preview frames enabled, it will actually submit 2 jobs—one with the preview frames list at a higher priority, and another with the rest of the agenda, at the normal priority (as specified in the job's Priority field). You will get, consequently, 2 job IDs for the submission.