Clarification of some Template engine commands please

Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Back to forum
    Posted in: Templates
  • SimonOld
    26th March 2008 at 5:24 pm #14242

    Would someone like to clarify the function of the following aspects of templates for me, please. I read the relevant section in the manual which helped enormously, but there are still a couple of things that I don’t understand fully.

    Partial answers more than welcome!!

    1) DETECTION_LOGIC & DETECTION_LOGIC_PROC – any ideas how to identify the correct settings here for software running on Apple Mac OS X ?

    2) GUESSPROJECTPATH etc – what is the syntax for these commands and how do the relate to other variables and the Explorer submission dialogue – my understanding is very patchy – I can see that PATH_BUILDER is a reserved keyword but that’s about it.

    3) MAP commands – I’m unclear when I need to use these to map values with certain Muster internal ones. How does it work? Does muster use MAP to substitute its own values for specific chunks, and use the value ADDed in the DECLARE SUBMISSION session as parameters from which to calculate the internal values?

    4) With the “submission and command builder supported items” I don’t understand the purpose of some of the options…
    i) ACTIVABLE/NOTACTIVABLE – what do these options do?
    ii) MANDATORY/NOTMANDATORY – ditto. Although I could probably hazard a guess.
    iii) SUBST/NOSUBST – again, I have no idea what these do.
    iv) Filter lists – the examples I have seen have all been file lists, and I assume that these apply to file selection dialogue boxes to make life easier for end users. However, what is the relevance of these on the OS X platform? I note that in the Maya template for the Engine_Mac section the MAYAEXECUTABLE FILE_SELECTOR hasa filter of *.exe

    Apologies if I have missed obvious clues and explanations elsewhere on any of these questions. Any comments that might help me, nomatter how small or focussed, gratefully accepted.

    Leonardo Bernardini
    1st April 2008 at 5:21 pm #14803

    Hi Simon,

    1) Those commands are used to catch the real process executable in order to correctly assign a process priority (idle/realtime/andsoon). The detection logic may be DIRECTPROC, CHILDPROC and CHILDPROC2. Direct proc means that what you spawn from the command line section is the final rendering process, no further options to configure. CHILDPROC means that what you spawn, will spawn an additional process, muster will need to catch the process in the process list, so you’ve to configure the DETECTION_LOGIC_PROC with the name of the process as reported by the task Manager and/or the ps utility. CHILDPROC2 goes further (as it happens on some Maya version), you spawn a process that spawn another process that spawn another process( hehe :) ), it that case you’ll need to configure the DETECTION_LOGIC_PROC and DETECTION_LOGIC_PROC2 according.

    2) this enables the path builder as you already understood. It’s used to guess the project path from the choosen file, the Maya template shows a good example on how to use that.

    3) MAP is used to map custom submission values to internal ones, in example, Muster always expect a start_frame internal variable. You may set your own field and call it MYFIELD to hold the starting frame, but you’ll need to tell muster that MYFIELD is the starting frame, you can do that using MAP start_frame MYFIELD

    4) ACTIVABLE: Let you devine a variable that accepts user activation in the submission panel. In example, if you want to let the user choose to save the files in a different location, you can use an ACTIVABLE field and concatenate the required command line chunk using a macro like %ISACTIVE(MYFIELD -renderdest %ATTR(MYFIELD)) , MANDATORY is used for validation, Muster will check if the field is empty and won’t let you send a job if it is. SUBST/NOSUBST applies to cross platform subtitution engine, if the variable holds a path that may require path substitution, you can specify it with SUBST , the filter lists just apply to the file picker dialog (if supported on the platform).

    Cheers,

Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic.