How to flipbook on deadline/farm with ui available? Gives more options to user

[Tyfx567]

Hi,

Of course, when PDG submits background job or farm job - it submits in a command line env way so no UI is available. New flipbook node or openGL node give you the option to submit flipbooks to the farm on GPU enabled machines, but this option is extremely limited in a huge way - grabbing the viewport exactly how it is in it's current state. What I mean is - being able to display hard templated geo, templated geo, ghosted geo, viewport background easily, black vs blue background, all those functions are hard coded or just gone. Particularly I'm interested in being able to see hard templated geometry since this is very useful when wanting to see multiple geos without merging and messing up attributes in the viewport - it's also much faster to preview this way as well. 

So now comes the issue. Since PDG submits farm jobs without the ui available - this means we are not able to flipbook using flipbookSettings or hscript('viewwrite') commands in the background. This forces us to be restricted to flipbook node or openGL rop nodes. I'm asking if there is a way around this limitation? To spawn a job on the farm but WITH the ui enabled so that things like the sceneViewer.flipbookSettings and sceneViewer.flipbook() commands could actually work without crashing on the farm? 

I was looking into hython, studying up on how TOPS works, but I don't know how to do this without more information. Can anyone give me more background?