Deadline is a hassle-free administration and compute management toolkit for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX based render farms. It offers a world of flexibility and a wide-range of management options for render farms and compute clusters of all sizes, and supports over 70 different content creation applications out of the box.

Deadline 7.2 is the latest version of Thinkbox Software's scalable high-volume compute management solution, and includes many helpful new features and bug fixes.

New features include new Quick Draft options to create movies from rendered images or perform file conversions without having to create template scripts. Integration with NIM Labs? NIM pipeline management tool enables the creation of NIM renders, and automates the uploading of thumbnails and movies to NIM when jobs complete. Enhanced support for SideFX Software?s Houdini introduces Jigsaw region rendering, HServer interactive rendering, and HQueue simulation node slicing.

HIGHLIGHTED FEATURES
New ?Quick Draft? Options Added to Job Submitters
New Quick Draft options have been added to most of the job submitters that allow you to easily create movies from your rendered images or perform file conversions, without having to create a Draft template script. Instead, a generic Draft template that ships with Deadline is now used, and it lets you specify settings like Output Type, Codec, Resolution, and Frame Rate.

NIM Integration
Support has been added for NIM, which is a pipeline management tool. This includes automatic Render creation, and thumbnail and movie uploading. NIM can be chosen as an integration option in the After Effects, Cinema 4D, Hiero, Maya, and Nuke submitters. Support for other applications will be added when NIM supports them.

GPU Affinity Settings for Slaves
GPU affinity can now be set for Slaves, in the same way that CPU affinity can be set. These GPU affinity settings can be used by Deadline?s application plugins to set the GPUs to use for the render if the job?s renderer supports it. Currently, the GPU affinity settings are only used by the Maya and Softimage plugins when
the RedShift renderer is being used.

For example, if you have two Slaves running on a machine with 4 GPUs, you could set their affinity so that one Slave uses GPUs 0 and 1, and the other Slave uses GPUs 2 and 3. When these Slaves render RedShift jobs, they will pass the GPUs they want to use to RedShift so that each render only uses 2 GPUs.

Smarter Task Error Handling
An option has been added to the Failure Detection section of the Job Settings in the Repository Options that allows the slave to pick the next available task for a job if the job?s previous task generated an error. This allows the slave to try other tasks for the job after an error instead of repeatedly failing to render the same one. Note that this option is disabled by default.

New Application Support
Support has been added for After Effects CC 2015, Cinema 4D 17, DJV 1.1, Guerilla Render, Houdini 15, Houdini?s HServer, modo 901, Realflow 2015, TVPaint, and VRay for Sketchup.

Homepage:_http://deadline.thinkboxsoftware.com/