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Using Krakatoa with Deadline

Free Deadline™

The Deadline™ render farm management system is a hassle-free method to both administer and render on Microsoft Windows-based render farms of all sizes.

Frantic Films Software offers Deadline™ with a Free Mode since version 2.5, allowing users to take advantage of Deadline™ at no charge on small home farms with up to two render nodes.

This mode is fully featured and the only difference you will see is that FREE MODE is displayed on the Slave. Deadline™ will continue to run in Free Mode provided that no more than two slaves exist in the repository. As soon as a third slave is added, you will need a valid license to continue to use Deadline™. If you wish to return to using Free Mode, you will have to delete any extra slaves from the repository, which can be done from the Deadline™ Monitor.

For Krakatoa users not currently running Deadline™, this offer allows you to easily obtain the tools needed to queue and automatically process and and speed up particle partitioning.

See the Deadline™ pages on our website: Deadline Free Mode

Particle Partitioning with Deadline™

In the High Particle Counts topic, partitioning was discussed as a method of boosting particle counts beyond the constraints of Particle Flow. Although you can create partitions locally on your workstation, Krakatoa provides tools that help you automate this process. Use your licensed copy of Deadline™ or take advantage of Deadline’s Free Mode to automatically process any number of partitions.

  1. Krakatoa uses the functionality of the Submit Max To Deadline utility that ships with Deadline, but it provides its own Deadline submission controls within the Partitioning rollout.

NOTE: These controls will only be visible if Deadline is detected on your machine.

One Job Only Mode

In the simplest approach to Particle Partitioning, Krakatoa can automatically submit multiple partitions to Deadline as A SINGLE JOB where each task within the job would process one partition.

  1. Use the controls to specify pool, priority, job name and so on.
  2. In the Render Scene dialog, choose the Common tab, and set the Time Output to the desired frame range.
  3. In the Main Controls rollout, change Particle Mode to Save Particles To File Sequence.
  4. In the Save Particles To File Sequence group of controls of the Main Controls rollout, specify a path and name for your files either by typing in a name, by using the [...] button to browse to a path for your files or by using the [H] button to get an existing path from history. Note on filenames: Krakatoa will automatically append partition information to each file created in this process. Using the Partition Count, the current partition number and the current frame number, Krakatoa will create a filename in this format: d:\path_name\file_prefix_partPofN_####.prt (where P is the current partition, N is the total number of partitions, and #### is the frame number.)
  5. In the Particle Partitioning rollout, toggle on or off the Increment buttons for the random seeds you want to affect. By default, all Seeds are checked.
  6. Set Partition Count to the total number of partitions you desire.
  7. Make sure the drop-down list in the "Deadline" group of controls is set to "One Job Only, Partitions As Tasks".
  8. If your render slave has multiple CPUs / Cores, only one CPU will be used by Particle Flow and Krakatoa to process the particles (Particle Flow is not multi-threaded). If the machine has enough memory to process multiple partitions at the same time, you could submit the job with Concurrent Tasks Per Machine set to 2 or more.
  9. Click Submit All Partitions To Deadline button.

Krakatoa will submit all preferences as part of the job and submit the job as a MAXScript job where a dedicated script will run on each machine, increment the random number seeds according to your preferences and save each frame of the current partition using a MAXScript call to the render() method.


The main advantage of this method is that multiple tasks can be run concurrently on multiple CPUs / Cores of the same machine.

The main drawback of this mode is that if a task would crash, the whole partition would have to be calculated from the beginning since the task represents all frames in the partition. Crashing during partitioning is rare, but if you want to avoid this risk, you can try the alternative method described below:

One Job Per Partition Mode

Krakatoa provides a second Deadline Particle Partitioning mode where each Partition will be processed as a separate job and the Tasks in the Job will represent the actual frames of each partition.

  1. Use the Deadline controls to specify pool, priority, job name and so on.
  2. In the Render Scene dialog, choose the Common tab, and set the Time Output to the desired frame range.
  3. In the Main Controls rollout, change Particle Mode to Save Particles To File Sequence.
  4. In the Save Particles To File Sequence group of controls of the Main Controls rollout, specify a path and name for your files either by typing in a name, by using the [...] button to browse to a path for your files or by using the [H] button to get an existing path from history. Note on filenames: Krakatoa will automatically append partition information to each file created in this process. Using the Partition Count, the current partition number and the current frame number, Krakatoa will create a filename in this format: d:\path_name\file_prefix_partPofN_####.prt (where P is the current partition, N is the total number of partitions, and #### is the frame number.)
  5. In the Particle Partitioning rollout, toggle on or off the Increment buttons for the random seeds you want to affect. By default, all Seeds are checked.
  6. Set Partition Count to the total number of partitions you desire.
  7. Make sure the drop-down list in the "Deadline" group of controls is set to "One Job Per Partition, Frames As Tasks".
  8. Click Submit All Partitions To Deadline button.

Krakatoa will increment the random seeds and submit the scene once for each partition, creating as many jobs as requested partitions. After all submissions have finished, a message will display the results - success of failuer - for each submission.

The main advantage of this method is that if a frame failed to save correctly, the machine will retry to process it without necessarily having to start from the beginning of the partition.

The main drawbacks of this method are that the submission takes longer, a machine with 4 CPUs can only use one to process particles and the Job List in the Deadline Monitor can get rather crowded with many partitions.

Submitting a Partition Range To Deadline

Krakatoa and Deadline can also process sub-ranges of partitions instead of the whole range using either of the two methods outlined above.

Instead of pressing the Submit All Partitions To Deadline, simply specify the first and last partition in the range to be processed and press the Submit Partition Range To Deadline button.

To submit only one partition, set both the From and To values in the range to the same value.