Submitting nCloth caches

[Bizzywater]

Hello,

Let me start by saying how great i think Qube is - it has been fantastic for our rendering pipeline.  We have had no major issues with rendering, but my question pertains to caching.  My artists would like to be able to submit there nCloth caches to the farm so they can keep working while the caches run.  I can get the command to run fine within Maya, ex:

select pPlane1; doCreateNclothCache 4 { "2", "1", "10", "OneFilePerFrame", "1", "Ncloth_Data","0","Cloth_Test","1", "add", "0", "1", "1","0","1" };

Is there a way to design a job which would just open Maya and create the cache on 1 subjob for a certain frame range with out engaging the renderer? I have been trying to create a command line job to so but its a little over my head.  Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

[shinya]

Hi Bizzywater,

Thanks for your compliments!

You can probably do that with the cmdline jobtype.  You'd have to first find out
how exactly to run that entirely on the command line, outside of qube.

I'd save your mel command in a script, and use maya's prompt/batch mode to
run it. 


 mayabatch -prompt -batch -file "/path/to/scene.mb" -script "/path/to/myscript.mel"


Depending on you platform, the "mayabatch" command may need to be substituted
with "maya", and/or you may need to specify the full-path to it.  Also, you probably
want to add a "quit -f" to the end of your script too, so that maya exits after
it's done running the script.

Once you've got that working outside of qube, then you can just submit
the same command line using the "cmdline" job submission from the Qube GUI,
or from "qbsub".

Hope that helps!

[Bizzywater]

Thank you for the quick response.  So far unfortunately i have been unable to get it working.  I thought maybe i could use the Maya Mel Job submission to allow me to submit my caches, but no matter what i enter it always returns a syntax error.  Even when i submit a blank Maya Mel "ls" Job it returns a syntax error on the base command: print `ls %(nodes)s` that is there by default with this job.  Is this a bug with the Mel submission forms?

Any further advice would be very helpful.

Thank you again,

Bizzwater

[Scot Brew]

We cannot reproduce it on our side with 5.4.5 or the current in-development version.  Regardless, the fix should be something simple.  What version of the QubeGUI are you using?

[Scot Brew]

We have found an issue with single quotes (') on Windows that may be causing an error, though it will work on Linux and OSX. 

Using the double quote (") will work, but it will mean that any quoted items in the command will have to be escaped with \.  A cross-platform solution will be posted soon to address this so it will work on Windows, Linux, and OSX.

[Scot Brew]

Attached is an updated maya_melCmds.py interface that will work on Windows, Linux, and OSX.  That should get you up and running no matter what platform you are using.  It will be incorporated as well in the next release.

The single-quote ('), double-quote ("), and grave (`) behave slightly differently on Windows as compared with OSX and Linux. 

On Linux/OSX, one can get around a lot of the escaping of characters by using single-quotes (') in the cmdTemplate around the -command option.



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[mefx]

hi, is it possible to have an example of how to make the double quote work. I'm trying to submit a Maya Mel job and it's getting rid of the double quotes in tube. an example of how to write the command in the submission window would be very helpful. thanks