Contrary to the title of this blog post, SuperDev has been doing anything but sleeping. A new agent, version 2.46, was released earlier today that will greatly assist our customers by providing more “under the hood” information about their render jobs. This agent can now request application log files from the farm while your scene file is rendering. Use of this function will retrieve up to 3 log files from the render application instances rendering your job. If your job is in error state, the frames/tiles that are errored are displayed. If everything is peachy keen, a random 3 in-process frame logs are delivered. Since you can request this information at any time, it breaks the dependency on waiting for support to respond if you request log files or more information. Also, if your render app/engine reports progress and you’ve submitted a non-tiled single-frame job, you can see what the render application reports in terms of completion information by looking at that log.
Another small new feature for Maya users is that the agent now looks up to 3 levels deep to find your project root folder. This was requested by Maya users that have subfolders inside their “/scenes” folder to sort or organize their scene files. Now, a scene file path like “/scenes/November/outtakes/outtakes1.ma” would have its project folder compressed and uploaded with the job correctly. No need to move the .ma back down to /scenes any more.
Carry on!
