Also doing this on a daily basis seems pretty inconvenient for a render farm, that probably shares the same plugins as production
Ah yes, not sure this relates to render farms. What size of studio are we talking about here? If it’s about 20 ppl, all running Windows then things are likely a little different then if we’re talking 500 ppl running Linux. In the case of 500 workstations, I think each machine on a render farm is typically capable of running a variety of versions on the fly, via environment configuration based on which job is coming in. For example, if a job is sent out to render a scene with the following requirements. "app": "maya-2013x64", "render": "arnold-1.0", "plugins": ["somePlugin-10.1.12", "someOtherPlugin-1.0.0"] Then the machine could set environment variables (i.e. paths to where these versions reside) for these to get picked up during the boot cycle of Maya prior to initiating a render. Ultimately, it depends on how flexible you need to be. If you render all projects using the same version and software, then life will be a little easier. Maybe it would be the best if pipeline TDs could enforce a global restart with a 10min warning period for artists to react!? This was the case for us (at Framestore), typically after-hours and if you worked late you could cancel the restart, which would try again a few hours later. I’ve seen videos of Tools (Unreal Editor) where they do on-the-fly replacement of compiled code while the engine is running. I think the key is to keep your dependencies modular so that you can configure your environment “on the fly” - i.e. by configuring the target render machine prior to launching. It’s conceptually similar to setting the PYTHONPATH, regardless of which tool or OS you use but if you do have a look at Rez you’ll get a sense of how complex it can get. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Python Programming for Autodesk Maya" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/python_inside_maya/CAFRtmOD3KgCXbcDp%3DX%2B98MUtwyGqfk9M4CtxW83Ti1VXWYg31Q%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
