Render integrations

smartCache offers functionality to submit the rendering of your smartCache nodes to a third party render engine, e.g. Deadline, Tractor, Royal Render, etc. But you can also use this functionality to trigger your own render logic and execute whatever code you need to execute.

Note

Note that smartCache offers the needed framework for render integrations. You will need to provide th logic to submit the caches to your render engine yourself. The reason is that this process is highly independent to everyone’s needs.

This is how it works

Navigate to this folder:

[PATH TO smartCache_vX.X.X]/cpXX/smartCache/render_integration

Where [PATH TO smartCache_vX.X.X] is the absolute path of your smartCache installation and cpXX is the Python version you use. If unsure execute this line to get information about it inside Nuke’s ScriptEditor:

import sys; print("cp{0}{1}".format(sys.version_info[0], sys.version_info[1]))

The render_integration package contains a deadline.py module. This module serves as an example how this works.

This deadline.py module contains a class DeadlineRenderIntegration that inherits from smartCache.render_integration.base.RenderIntegrationBase. Every render integration should inherit from that class. This is an abstract base class that provides the required interface. When implementing a concrete render integration class you will need to implement the following methods:

  • label: The label to use for the render button in the render dialog, see the following screenshot.
  • process: The logic to execute to render the cache or submit the cache for rendering. When executing this method, smartCache automatically passes the information about the write nodes (embedded in the selected smartCache nodes) as well as the entered frame range to it. So you don’t need to find out that information yourself anymore.
_images/render_integrations.png

Note

Please note again that the deadline.py is not complete! You need to implement the process method to your needs to submit the smartCache rendering to your farm.

Once you have implemented your custom render integration class you need to add it to:

smartCache.render_integration.__init__.RENDER_INTEGRATIONS

It will then show up in the smartCache render dialog’s graphical user interface automatically for your.

During development we encourage you to reload the module so that you see code changes immediately:

from importlib import reload  # Only needed for python-3

from smartCache.render_integration import deadline
reload(deadline)
from smartCache import render_integration
reload(render_integration)