Renderpal 2.5.0 Released
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
The fifth point release of RenderPal V2 brings great new additions, many improvements and important bug fixes:
RenderPal V2 2.5 now offers a new license management system: For every renderer and its versions, you can now specify how many licenses are available and which pools and clients own a license. This avoids having new jobs sent to clients even if there currently is no free license slot available, eliminating common license problems.
In RenderPal V2 2.5, it is no longer only possible to create individual user accounts, but to also create entire user groups. Every account can now belong to such a group, making creating and managing accounts faster and easier.
In order to get information about the various objects in RenderPal V2, you had to directly query its database in previous versions. With this new point release, the console remote controller can be used to query data from the server, including net jobs and their chunks, pools and clients. This data, which comes in the XML format, can then be used, for example, to put statistics about your render farm on a website or to evaluate rendering times to calculate the costs of a job.
There are also several improvements for net jobs, like net job tags (which can be used for quick filtering) and net job coloring, as well as the ability to execute post-net job events either on success or on failure.
If you ever encountered a renderer that has crashed but stayed open (showing only a common crash dialog), this new version has the answer: RenderPal V2 can now monitor the CPU usage of rendering clients; if the usage drops below a certain threshold over a period of time, the chunk in question will be cancelled so that it can be picked up again, ensuring an uninterupted rendering flow.
We also dramatically improved the speed of the net job chunk list (and client list as well), which makes working with large net jobs much smoother. Deleting net jobs has also been made significantly faster.
Other important improvements include: The Linux and MacOSX clients will now report their CPU and memory usage; the console RC now supports multiple net job presets; the Python integration has been further improved and quite a lot more. See the full release notes and the changelog below for more details.
We have also created a small, leightweight Python library to wrap the console remote controller, called PyQuery, which can be found in the downloads sections. The submitter scripts for Maya and 3dsMax have been updated as well.