Render Wrangling with Deadline Monitor

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“Render Wrangling” is a term used for managing jobs in a render queue to ensure that jobs get rendered efficiently. Studios often employ “render wranglers” who monitor the render farm, kill jobs that have stalled, and change the priority of jobs in the queue as needed. 

You and your fellow students will be acting as the render wranglers of the CalArts render farm. It’s important that students work together to share the render farm and prioritize render jobs appropriately. If your job does not need to get rendered immediately, please set its Priority value to a lower number (the default value is 50) so that urgent jobs can jump to the top of the queue.

For render farm tech support, submit a ticket or send an email to 2popsupport@calarts.edu.

To launch the Deadline Monitor application, first make sure that FVCentral is mounted on your computer. Then go to Applications > Thinkbox > Deadline10 and double-click the DeadlineMonitor10 icon.

This will launch the Deadline Monitor application that you can use to view the progress of your render job and the other jobs in the render queue. If you need to make changes to a job, for example lowering another job’s priority so that your job will render first, you’ll need to enable Super User mode, by selecting Super User Mode from the Tools menu.

To modify a job’s properties, right-click on the job in the queue and choose Modify Job Properties.

In the Job Properties window, you can make some changes to the job including adjusting the job’s priority value.

If another student’s job on the farm is failing, you can right-click on the job and select Suspend Job or Fail Job. If possible, please contact the student to let them know that you have suspended or failed their job due to a problem. You should never delete another student’s job from the render queue. Here are some of the options available to you when you right-click on a job in the render queue.

Here are a few options you might utilize:

  • Suspend Job: This pauses the job.
  • Resume Job: This will unpause a job that has been suspended.
  • Complete Job: This marks a job as complete. This could be useful if a job has finished rendering all of its frames, but is still listed in the queue as rendering. 
  • Fail Job: This will mark a job as failed and stop it from continuing to render.
  • Resubmit Job: This will resubmit a job to the render queue.
  • Delete Job: This will delete a job from the render queue. You should only use this on your own jobs. It is not necessary to delete your jobs from the render queue after they are finished.

If the farm is not being utilized efficiently, please submit a ticket to let the tech staff know.

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