Deadline Issues: TeamRender PRO

3dduff

Now that Deadline has stopped active development, there is a void in the C4D product pipeline. The C4D community NEEDS a more powerful Network Rendering Management solution. Now would be a perfect time to take the training wheels off of TeamRender and make something like TeamRender PRO.

The core functionality of TeamRender works well. but it's seriously lacking when it comes to managing a render with more than 2-3 Render nodes.

Here are a few features I would love to see in TeamRender:

More analytics. During a long render, I am constantly remoting into my render nodes and then doing a bunch of calculations on paper to see how the render is progressing. Give us a dashboard that gives us this information. Examples of some data I would love to see
- frame ranges (frames done on that node, frames ASSIGNED to that node)
- List of finished frames and info (node used, time taken, etc.)
- job start time, estimate end time, percentage completed, frames finished, frame in queue
Render resume. The manager looks at a job in the queue and makes a list of missing frames and lets you continue rendering ONLY those frames. This is DESPERATELY NEEDED when using the render queue, and you need to stop a render.
frame checker (if the frames are less than the user-defined file size, requeue all those frames)
one Frame per GPU. This is a key feature that maximizes a farm's efficiency. If I have a render node with 1 super face GPU and one slower GPU, the node will sit there and need to wait for the slower GPU to finish before a new frame is started. If you're only rendering a couple of dozen frames, this is a negligible amount of time. But I have been on jobs where we are rendering 5000-8000 frames. This small boost in efficiency could save hours, if not days, in render time. I know Deadline uses that WILL NOT use TeamRender because this feature is missing.
A dedicated data panel that is a window into ANY render that is running, with a history of previous renders. This could be a new tab in the Render Queue window. start a render, and watch the progress of that render in one window panel. And it could have hooks into the TeamRender server. You can fire off a render locally as the Render Queue does now, or SEND JOB TO THE RENDER SERVER. It copies the current job to the server and starts the job. This would let users utilize their farm, and continue to work without leaving C4D.
A mobile app that you can track not just the progress of a job, but the conditional of the nodes in the farm

We are professionals who use C4D daily. Please provide a professional-grade tool to manage our work. Almost all of the features I have pointed out above utilize features that already exist. We just need the tools to be more polished.

Some people will continue to use Deadline, but many people are looking for a new, modern render management tool to fill the void AWS is leaving. Very little work has gone into TeamRender since it was introduced as a replacement for C4D's Net Render. Many people would say TeamRender Server still has not been updated with all of Net Render's features. There is a need for this. EVERYONE renders their work. Why leave the last phase of the job to be managed by a 3rd party?

ferdinand

Hey @3dduff,

Welcome to the Maxon developers forum and its community, it is great to have you with us!

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About your First Question

These are developer forums, and while you have posted in the correct off topic forum, I am not sure how well placed your topic here is. We as the SDK team have little to do with the active development of Cinema 4D outside of SDK features.

But Deadline is not as dead as you make it out to be. AWS simply has shifted their focus to Deadline Cloud. There are also a c4d bindings for Deadline Cloud. I think they still struggle a bit with asset management, but the product is quite mature. The Deadline team is also active on these forums. I understand that some users will see Deadline Cloud not as an equivalent replacement, but 'deadline has stopped active development' is simply not a correct assessment either.

The best way to make a feature request directed at Maxon is to create a ticket in our Support Center and share there a suggestion. When you are looking for a user-to-user discussion, you are probably better served with the Redshift forums.

Cheers,
Ferdinand