Hi,

I've been away for a bit, back now for a while

I have a Priorities question.

In the simple example file, I have a classic “Generate Source geo in parallel, run multiple Wedge sims, render them” chain.

I want to set the priorities of the Mantra renders to favour “later” frames. The actual setting of the priorities is easy, just @pdg_frame>90 for example, in the Create When field.

However, I can't figure out how to get the priorities to apply to the Mantra tasks! I can't insert before the Mantra TOP because I have the Partition by Attribute, so no frames exist (yet).

What am I doing wrong?

17.5.222 Linux

Cheers,

Peter B

As you discovered, the ROP Fetch sets the priority to match the frame number. As it stands there's no way to tell the local scheduler to override this. This appears to be a glaring oversight. HQueue for example has a job priority jobparm that you could add an expression to on the ROP node which could be used to accomplish this.

However we do have an RFE in mind to address this in a nice way across the board:
We will add a new scheduler parm Priortize By
This would have a dropdown of options: Index, Frame, Custom

If you choose custom you can specify any attribute you like to be the priority. This way you can add an attribute custom_priority and set it to be 240 - @pdg_frame or whatever and it will be picked up by the scheduler indirectly.

Hi Chris,

Sounds good, so this would allow per-ROP customizations by doing overrides of the base Scheduler parm?

Specifically in my test case, the Geometry ROP priorities and the Mantra ROPs would have very different priorities.

That's why I liked the idea of the Attrib Create, it (appeared) to allow control via complex expressions per TOP.

I think I'll need to try it once you've added it to make sure I understand

Cheers,

Peter B