Hey guy's,

Was wondering if anybody is using Royal Render in PDG, and if they would be willing to share some info with me

Thanks in advance.

I just know from a colleague at Filmakademie who (semi-successfully) worked on this for a while and encountered some major conceptual problems in this endeavor. With that I mean the way Royal Render handles tasks versus how PDG handles tasks - what happened easily was that RR was completely flooded with jobs, and that RR demands some information on the status of jobs and was unable to be fed what PDG output normally resulting in instability. It somehow worked, but it was quite problematic and losing a big portion of the flexibility/reliability that PDG should offer.

Thanks for the info

Some update to this old post.
There is a new Houdini plugin for RR:
https://groups.google.com/g/rrKnights/c/Urzv2QGYVdA [groups.google.com]


About the issue described above:
There are different ways to submit PGD to a farm.

Job per PGD task
You can submit a job per PGD task, which SideFX does for hqueue as well.
But if you do not configure your scheduler settings or control it within the plugin, the Houdini submits 60 jobs per second (that's the default!). And if you do not limit the number of jobs inside the plugin, it does not stop until all tasks/jobs are submitted.
Now imagie you have 400 tasks in your TOP graph.
That floods the farm with 400 1-frame jobs which other artist/render wranglers do not like to see.
So you would need to reduce the number of jobs at the same time.

Frame per PGD task
You can assign a frame for each PDG task, which is what SideFX has done for their own Deadline plugin.
This reduces the number of jobs on the farm without limiting/deleting jobs.
But RR did was missing a python function to retrieve the status of each individual frame of your jobs frameset.
And Houdini want to get the status of each task instead of all task of a node.
This function is now available in RR.