LOS ANGELES — At SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, PipelineFX (www.pipelinefx.com) is showing Qube 6.6, the latest version of its renderfarm management software. Qube 6.6’s new Smart Share feature helps studios achieve maximum throughput, while Universal Callbacks and Flight Checks promote tight integration with production management/reporting tools.
“As pipelines grow more sophisticated, the need to protect against bottlenecks becomes even more important,” explains Richard Lewis, CEO of PipelineFX. “From customer discussions, it’s obvious that efficiency, multi-platform support and easy integration with both new and legacy tools is where Qube! needs to be. Qube! 6.6 takes them there.”
Smart Share improves the overall render pipeline throughput by automatically re-assigning idle workers once they conclude a job without intervention.
Some jobs require an action every time they are run on the farm. To help, Universal Callbacks are automatically executed for every job, instance or frame, giving operators an easy way to maintain integration with other software and scripts
Flight Checks registers scripts that will be executed on a worker immediately before or after a job or task runs. Use cases include ensuring assets that are essential to the job exist, pushing or pulling data from a production tracking system for targeted jobs or tasks, and/or transferring the results of a render job to a studio’s dailies system
The ArtistView has been improved with centralized preferences and plug-ins. Platform support has been added for all Autodesk 2015 products. Ubuntu 12.04 Linux is now fully supported and Python 2.7 is supported on applicable OS platforms. An upgraded version of MySQL server (5.5.37) is bundled to significantly improve supervisor performance and Python “load-once” jobs are now fully supported.