HQueue ifd's on listed clients / renders on any client? Possible?

[johnLIC]

I am working in a place that has 10 render farm machines.  We have two Engine licenses.  We have 10 render licenses.  I want to be able to use the settings in the advanced tab of the hq_render node.  Supposedly, you can list client machines that will do the ifd creation.  When I try to run a render job that way, all my frames get queue'd up and wait for the machine that picked up the ifd creation task, while there are several idle machines on the farm.  

 

We heard from Side Effects that we should be able to restrict ifd creation to two machines (since we have two licenses) and that the render jobs should pick up any other machine.  My mileage has varied!  I can not get that to work.  Is there a magic button I'm not aware of?  Anyone seen this work successfully with HQueue?

[goldleaf]

Here's an idea:

 

1) Create two groups on your server. One called IfdGenerators (add two Engine machines), and IfdRenderers (add the other 8 machines).

 

2) Configure your HQ Render ROP like this gif, assigning the groups where appropriate.

 

Does that work?

 

Keep in mind, sometimes IFD generation can take a long time if you have lots of deformation motion blur, since it copies all of that geometry to the IFD for each Geo Time Sample.

[johnLIC]

Aye Eye I.  Yes, indeed, you are correct sir.  After I wrote this post I had another look.  What threw me off is this:  In the advanced tab, if you set "assign to" to be either "listed clients" or "clients from listed group" and then hover over the word "client" or "client groups" the tooltip help window that pops up says 

 

"The list of clients that HQueue can assign the ifd creation jobs to. ..."

 

You can see how that might lead me to believe that I was providing a list of clients that HQueue could assign the ifd creation jobs to.  Ugh.

 

This is in H14, btw.