01 Deadline Quickstart

A few years ago Amazon Web Services (AWS) bought a company that makes my favorite render farm management tools, Thinkbox. Thankfully they didn’t sit on that purchase and let it die, instead they have invested in making it more heavily integrated into their cloud offerings as well as recently make the tools completely free.

Since it is now free I thought it might be nice to show some of the ways I work with Deadline since managing it can be time consuming.

Links!

https://github.com/postwork-io/deadline_docker

https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop/

https://git-scm.com/

PREPARE THE ENVIRONMENT

Install Docker Desktop

Go to the website and download the installer. Everything can remain default. When you go to launch Docker Desktop it will probably tell you the install is incomplete.

Download the MSI as instructed at the link and restart.

INSTALL GIT

You could got to the GIT repository and just download the folder as a ZIP, but then you won’t be able to pull updates. So install git.

PULL GIT REPO

Open up a command prompt and make a directory call workspace.

mkdir workspace

Navigate into that directory.

cd workspace

Clone the repository.

git clone https://github.com/postwork-io/deadline_docker.git

SETUP DEADLINE

BUILD CONTAINERS

During this process we will build the containers that will run all the components for Deadline. This takes a while depending on internet speed, be prepared to wait.

Navigate into the project directory.

cd deadline_docker

Copy the example.env file and rename it .env . These are environment variables that you can use to customize your settings. The most important thing to do is change any of the passwords to something more secure.

Run the build command.

docker compose build

RUN THE CONTAINERS

Now that the containers have been built they can be brought up. The first time a container is created there is some additional setup that occurs. Again be prepared to do a bit of waiting.

docker-compose up

That’s it! Deadline is up and running. If you have used Deadline in the past you can probably figure it out from here but if not…

USING DEADLINE

A NOTE ABOUT ADDRESSES

There are a handful of ways to connect to the repository and other resources that are now hosted on your machine.

The first way will only work if you are accessing the resources from the same device that is hosting them. You can use the hostname localhost or the IP address 127.0.0.1 .

In a lot of environments you can access the device by its hostname from other devices on the LAN. If you are unsure what the hostname is of the device open a command prompt/terminal and type in hostname.

If that does not work you might have to use the IP address. This can be found on windows by typing ipconfig into the command prompt and look for the number that matches up with the label IPv4 Address. It will probably look something like 192.168.1.XX, but the numbers might be different. If you have to use the IP address it would be a good idea to figure out how to make that IP Static. That is outside of this guide, but failure to do so would result in Deadline possibly going offline if a router has to reboot or the host machine is shutdown for an extended period of time between uses.

In a future tutorial I’ll use something called ZeroTier to crate a LAN across the internet. You will use the IP address from ZeroTier for connections.

INSTALLING THE CLIENT

During the setup process the client is downloaded to a webserver running in Docker called filebrowser. You can access those installers by going to {the computers address}:8080 for example my computer has the hostname of patient-staircase so I would type patient-staircase:8080 into the url bar of my web browser.

Login using the default username and password admin/admin and change the password. Then navigate to the installers folder and download the installers for your platform.

While on the filebrowser site navigate to the certs folder and download Deadline10RemoteClient.pfx to somewhere only you can access on your computer.

Once the installers are downloaded run the DeadlineClient installer. Most of the defaults are fine, just make sure you are connecting using the Remote Connection Server.

When prompted for the Remote Connection Server information enter the address of the computer hosting the RCS and the port from the environment variables, which will most likely be 4433. For the certificate use the Deadline10RemoteClient.pfx and the RCS CERT PASS from the .env file as the passphrase.

Installing Host Plugins

The best way to submit render jobs to Deadline is from a plugin that runs natively in the DCC. In order to download the plugin open up the newly installed Deadline Monitor and from the top tool bar click on Tools > Download Integrated Submission Scripts Check any boxes for plugins you want to download and select a location where to download them.

In the downloaded folder for each plugin there should be a folder called Installer. Run each installer for the corresponding plugin.

Each plugin will show up in a differently in each DCC but they should all say something along the lines of Submit to Deadline .

Current documentation for Deadline 10.2 is at this link. Any other versions of documentation can be found at https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/ .

Rendering

To render on a computer just start the Deadline Worker application and it will be ready to pick up jobs that have been submitted. You can monitor and control jobs from the Deadline Monitor application.