Author Topic: Can you Create multiple frames inside a job from the commandline  (Read 4265 times)

danprice

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Can you Create multiple frames inside a job from the commandline
« on: September 13, 2008, 01:19:23 AM »
I have a commandline I want to run say z:\foo.exe that accepts a single parameter ie a filename. I also have a list of 1000 files to run ie I want to do .
z:\foo.exe file1.txt
z:\foo.exe file2.txt
z:\foo.exe file3.txt

I can easily submit 1000 jobs in Qube but I would really like to create 1 job and have it generate a 1000 frames or subjobs.  Is that possible to do with the command line right now I'm just using
qbsub.exe to create my jobs

eric

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Re: Can you Create multiple frames inside a job from the commandline
« Reply #1 on: September 17, 2008, 01:50:02 AM »
Here's an excerpt from the Using Qube manual that should help:

Frame-based Jobs
Normally, if you submit a qbsub job to multiple CPUs, Qube will execute the exact same task on each CPU. This would prove redundant if you would like to render a different frame on each CPU, so qbsub has the built-in capability to submit a job to run on multiple CPUs, but send different frames to each running subjob. All that is needed is the range of frames to run, and the command line to submit with the QB_FRAME_NUMBER macro used to determine where the frame number should be inserted into the command line when the command is run.
 
The standard frame range format for Qube follows this convention:
start-endxstep

You may also list frames as well as combine frames and ranges with commas:
frame,?
frame, [frame|range,?]

Examples
1-100Frames 1 to 100
1-100x10Every 10th frame from 1 to 100
1,2,3,4,5Frames 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5
1-10,20-30Frames 1 to 10 and 20 to 30
-100-100Frames -100 to 100
-10- -1Frames -10 to -1
10-20, 30-40x2Frames 10 to 20 and every second Frame from 30 to 40

Example
% qbsub --range 1-100 Render ?s QB_FRAME_NUMBER ?e QB_FRAME_NUMBER myscenefile.ma

Frame-based jobs may also be done based upon frame partitions as well. This is also accomplished in combination with a different set of macro strings. QB_FRAME_START is used to denote the first frame in the range, QB_FRAME_END is used to denote the last frame in the range. QB_FRAME_STEP is used if the frame range contains a step value. This is useful for applications which are more efficient when handling more frames than one at
a time.

Example
Render frames from 1 to 100 in partitions of 10 each:
% qbsub --range 1-100 --chunk 10 Render ?s QB_FRAME_START ?e QB_FRAME_END myscenefile.ma

Example
Render frames from 1 to 100 in 2 partitions of 50 each:
% qbsub --range 1-100 --partition 2 Render ?s QB_FRAME_START ?e QB_FRAME_END myscenefile.ma