cerda

Welcome to Cerda's documentation. This tool will allow you to transfer the files that get rendered at renderfarm to either local disk or Dropbox account. Also there is a notification feature that allows you to get sent an email after a specific number of frames get rendered. Cool, innit?

• Video Demo: https://vimeo.com/185853793
• Documentation: https://docwhite.github.io/cerda
• Source: https://github.com/docwhite/cerda
• Bugs: https://github.com/docwhite/cerda/issues

NOTE: This is intended to be used at NCCA labs only.

Follow these steps in the labs. I wrote how to install pip locally because we don't have sudo privileges, pity. No worries it is literally 3 lines of code as I like to keep things simple.

WARNING: This tool is in early stage. Please contribute reporting issues on http://github.com/docwhite/cerda or directly by speaking to that Spanish shy guy in the labs, or drop me an email [email protected]

Upcoming features:

• Direct integration with Qube: There will be no need to do all the steps to dispatch the job to the render farm.
• Improved mail formatting with thumbnails of what has been rendered.

Prerequisites

If you are in the labs you will need to install pip locally. Follow these steps carefully:

Open a terminal and change directory to home

$ cd ~

Get the pip installer script with wget (downloads a file form the web)

$ wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -P ~

Install pip locally (it will get installed to ~/.local)

$ python ~/get-pip.py --user

Append the binaries directory that contains all the pip executables to your $PATH variable. Either do it manually or simply execute this line of code that will write a new line on your .bashrc file

$ echo "PATH=\$PATH:~/.local/bin" >> ~/.bashrc

Close the shell and start a new one. Alternatively reload your profile

$ source ~/.bashrc

Installation

Now you got pip up and running! The next move is to install the tool using it

$ pip install cerda --user

Usage

Check out the help command cerda -h::

usage: cerda [-h] [-dbox] [-e EMAIL] [-c COUNT] [-r EVERY] [-t CUSTOMTYPES]
             source target

An NCCA render farm collector.

positional arguments:
  source                Remote location path (relative to home) where the
                        frames get generated.
  target                Custom file extensions to mark for transfering. I.e.
                        -t tiff,exr,obj

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -dbox, --dropbox      Will send the files to the root path of your dropbox
                        account.
  -e EMAIL, --email EMAIL
                        Email address to send notification to after -c frames
                        have been rendered.
  -c COUNT, --count COUNT
                        At this numer of frames, send an email to the address
                        specified with -m flag.
  -r EVERY, --every EVERY
                        How often to check for frames dropped (in seconds)
  -t CUSTOMTYPES, --customTypes CUSTOMTYPES
                        Custom file extensions to mark for transfering. I.e.
                        -t tiff,exr,obj

WARNING: Please make sure the paths you pass in are relative to your home folder.

Examples

Example 1

My renderfarm is rendering out the frames at /home/i7243466/project1/render on the tete server. I want the frames to get transfered to my local drive at location /home/i7243466/rendered/frames

$ cerda project1/render rendered/frames

Or you could also use the short flags

$ cerda project1/render rendered/frames

Example 2

My renderfarm is rendering out the frames at /home/i7243466/project1/render on the tete server. I want the frames to get transfered to my Dropbox account under /some/folder

$ cerda project1/render some/folder --dropbox

Or

$ cerda project1/render rendered/frames -dbox

Example 3

My renderfarm is rendering out the frames at /home/i7243466/project1/render on the tete server. I want the frames to get transfered to my Dropbox account under /some/folder and when it has finished rendering, which means 20 frames get collected, send me an email notification

$ cerda project1/render some/folder --dropbox --email [email protected] --count 20

Or

$ cerda project1/render rendered/frames -dbox -e [email protected] -c 20

When it is finished you will receive an email from [email protected]. Hopefully it won't get blocked as I am using Google's own SMTP servers.

If you find any problem or bug please report it using the Issues page or drop me a line at [email protected]

Example 4

My renderfarm is rendering out Alembic .abc files at /home/i7243466/project1/render on the tete server. I want the files to get transfered to my local drive at location /home/i7243466/hello/alembics::

$ cerda project1/render hello/alembics --customTypes abc

Or you could also use the short flags::

$ cerda project1/render hello/alembics --t abc

You can specify more than custom type to transfer like --customTypes png,jpg,abc,tiff No spaces, separated by commas.