Our studio currently uses 120 cores dedicated to NR at all times and plans to double that over the next year. NR is a huge part of our success and we're thankful for it.
That being said, we'd love to see the following features;
1.) Multiple Job Jumping in the Queue
Right now, an administrator (or anyone logged in as one) can go in and move jobs up and down in the queue, one by one. This is nice to have, but would be a huuuuge time saver if we could jump multiple jobs in one click, by say, grabbing jobs 2-30 and moving them down below jump 31, making job #31, next in line.
We often have 2 or 3 designers/artists adding things to the queue at any given time, and as the queue gets longer, sometimes priorities will change on the fly, and suddenly the job which is stuck in 56th position needs to be moved up. It is a total time suck as you can imagine when you have to manually move that job up 55 times.
2.) Pausing the Processing of a Job
I know this was temporarily a feature in KS NR 7.0 and was taken away when the NR reverted back to what it is now. I know you can somewhat 'pause' a job by jumping it in the queue, but if it is currently working on a task, it will finish that task, right? Being able to pause a job mid-render would give us some real flexibility when job priorities change. This is especially true on those certain jobs where the last region or two just seem to take forever, but you'd hate to cancel the job and lose all of the progress. Which is a great segway into feature #3...
3.) Being able to download a job before it is completed
There have been some cases, where a render on the network is just taking a long time, perhaps it went overnight, some settings were a bit extreme, etc. And it is finally down to the last one or two regions, but it is in a tough spot, maybe an overly complex material resides in that spot. Well, we let it run all night...do we let it go for a couple more hours, tie up the queue even longer? Or should we cut our loses, cancel the job and lose all of the progress on the rest of the image. It happens more than we like to admit. The solution would be, ability to download the image (unfinished) and missing some regions. Perhaps those regions just get filled in Black and we need to send a patch to the queue later, which is a heck of a lot better position to be in, than losing the rest of the image because one area was problematic.
Hope some of that would be productive. I know it seems simple to me to make this happen, but I am not a developer, and I know things all are all intertwined. Thoughts?
I would second these requests!
Yessss to all of these. I already use render region to patch areas of images, there are times when I purposely render a large image at lower samples knowing I can send regions to render seperately and patch them in later. Usually the areas with physical lights.
Hey David,
Thanks for the suggestions.
@1. Would "move to front of line" be ok or would you prefer more granular control?
@2. You can Pause now by right-clicking on a job and selecting Pause.
@3. I agree this would be helpful but I'm not sure if it's possible to download the full-res image before it's complete. I will check in with Dev to see.
Thanks for the responses, Rex!
1; Move to the front would be excellent, as that is what we need 90% of the time. The total control would be nice, but honestly, it is move to the front that we really want.
2; I see what you're saying. Yes, I can pause a job now, but it will continue to work on the current task if a node has already started a region. This is usually a good thing because I imagine it makes it possible to unpause and not lose progress, but in the case where we have a stubborn region and a node is wasting away its resource trying to finish this particular region before it truly 'pauses' and moves onto the next job, I wish there were a way to tell it to just stop, delete the progress on that region and move to the next job. Hope that makes sense.
3; Totally understand the limitations there. I know 'packing' the image is one of the last tasks which is completed when the regions are all complete. Perhaps there could be an override internally when someone chooses to download while not complete, it will take all incomplete regions, fill it with black? Push it through to packing. Even if it costs us the fact that the job is now 'done'. I think this would be a better trade off to have parts of the image done, and we can region render the areas separately.
@2. I have a request submitted for "prompt user on task completion when pausing job"
:) thanks, Rex! I mean, these are just my ideas (and my team collectively agree), I'm hoping they could be useful for others.
No problem David. These are definitely improvements that will benefit NR users.
Quote from: Rex on October 30, 2018, 12:36:43 PM
@2. You can Pause now by right-clicking on a job and selecting Pause.
That's interesting... but I don't see that anywhere on my machine (I'm logged in as Admin on NR, running 7.3.37). Am I missing something? I only have the option to move up/down or delete a job.
Quote from: RRIS on November 21, 2018, 05:30:25 AM
That's interesting... but I don't see that anywhere on my machine (I'm logged in as Admin on NR, running 7.3.37). Am I missing something? I only have the option to move up/down or delete a job.
I think it is a feature starting with 8.0
So in the 8.1 update, looks like the naming has changed from 'Move Up/Down' when right clicking a job to 'Increase Priority' or 'Decrese Priority', but the function is essentially the same?
It just seems to work as it did before, moving the jobs up and down in the queue, but still only 1 by 1. Am I missing something?
We'd still love the ability to jump more than 1 job at a time. Is anyone else experiencing this the same?
You're right, it is just a change in name due to "move up/down" conflicting with column reordering.
Quote from: Rex on November 26, 2018, 11:18:31 AM
You're right, it is just a change in name due to "move up/down" conflicting with column reordering.
Gotcha, Rex, thanks for the response; is there still a plan in place to implement a new 'move to front'?
Yes, "move to front" is on the list for 9.
maybe it would be even more advanced, to have (in addition) the possibility to set a priority of a job: low, normal and high
with this one could define directly on sending a job, or also later when managing jobs, where it should be located within the queue...
e.g. all the "time doesn't really matter"-jobs got a low prio, and new send jobs automatically overtake them (because the have normal)
(idea was taken from other softwares working with queues)
what do you think?
:) That's how 7.0 NR originally worked I think. But it does create more work on the user in my opinion. If my priorities suddenly change, and I've got 27 out of 67 jobs in the queue marked high priority, then I need to go find those jobs and lower their priority (of course, you could argue, making the UI so you can sort by priority for easy selection, but then you have to allow multiple jobs to be selected at once...goes down the rabbit hole).
Simply being able to throw a job to the front of the line would help tremendously right now. Being able to multi-select jobs and send them to the front of the line would be an absolute godsend. Appreciate your help with this Rex.