Now that you have submitted some jobs, you will want to monitor them in the Qube UI. In fact, there are now two Qube UIs - the original, now called Wrangler View (because it contains features that an administrator or render wrangler would use) and qubeArtistView, intended for artists to monitor and interact with their jobs.
If you have been working through the Qube 101 documentation in order, you will probably be running the Wrangler View, which has a white background and an "Administration" menu item across the top. In this section we are going to skim across the surface of the qubeArtistView UI, but most of the things covered here will also be true in the Wrangler View, though you may have to look in slightly different spots to locate them.
Launch the Qube Artist View UI
To launch the Artist View, do this:
- Windows: Click on the black and white Qube ArtistView desktop icon, or locate it in the Program Files\pfx\qube\bin folder (Note: not the "Program Files (x86)" folder)
- OS X: Click on the black and white Qube ArtistView desktop icon, or locate it in the Applications/pfx folder
- Linux: Type 'qubeArtistView' at the shell prompt (no quotes)
You should see this:
You should see the test jobs or other jobs that you have submitted. Notice that they are color coded - if you are lucky, they will all be blue, which is the color of a successfully completed job. Jobs which failed are colored red. The jobs also have a status, such as "complete", "failed" or "running." Running jobs are shown in green. There are other colors for other statuses, which you will become familiar with as you submit and monitor jobs.
Overview
The row of buttons just under the Jobs tab is a set of filters which will show or hide jobs in the Jobs Panel. An important one to know about is the User Filter - when set, you will only see your own jobs. When unset, you will see all jobs. Click and unclick this button to see the difference. Note that if you are on Linux, you may have submitted jobs as the root or qubeproxy user which will be hidden if you choose this filter.
Let's have a look at some simple tasks you can do from this UI. The Jobs pane shows your job(s). By default, they are sorted by Jobid, but you can sort them by any other column by clicking on the column header. For example, you can sort them by Name by clicking on the "Name" label at the top of that column. Clicking once sorts them in ascending order, clicking again sorts them in the other direction. Now, click on one of your test jobs in the Jobs pane.
Notice that in the panel below the Jobs panel, you can look at the Job Properties on one tab, and the Output on the next two tabs (Output Log & Error Log). This is the Job Details panel - we'll cover that in a second.
Interact with a Job
Let's retry one of your test jobs. You might want to do this if the job is working, but you have changed some of the input files and want to rerun it without changing any of the job's parameters. Just right-mouse on the job line in the Jobs panel, and choose Retry Job:
If you want to rerun the job, but change some of the submission parameters - maybe the frame range was wrong, or you want to send the output to a different location - then you want to resubmit. Again right-mouse on the job line in the Jobs panel, and choose Resubmit. In this case you will get a Qube submission dialog, and you can modify any of the parameters before hitting "Submit". Note that when you resubmit, you are creating a new job with a new job ID. This is different from retrying an existing job.
Finally, you may want to kill a job. If you have a long running job and you know the results are going to be wrong, or you want to stop it for some other reason, you can kill the job. This is also a right-mouse button menu entry.
There are other job-related tasks you can perform - for more details, see the User's Guide.
Watching Progress
Once a job is running, if it takes more than a few seconds (and most do) then you will want to keep an eye on progress. By default, the UI does not refresh itself, meaning that as the job progresses, nothing will change in the interface. You can force a change by clicking on the appropriate refresh button. Notice that there are two, one for the overall job progress and another for the individual frame updates.
or you can configure Qube to automatically update the UI every so often. To do this, go to Edit in the top menu and choose Preferences. Click on Auto Refresh / Interval. You can leave the refresh interval at 60 seconds, or make it shorter or longer.
Note that asking the Supervisor for an update every few seconds puts more load on it, and if there are many artists all doing the same thing, you could be slowing down the overall farm just for the sake of convenience. Think twice before asking for lots of updates you aren't going to be noticing anyway.
Looking at Job Details
The Job Details panel has a number of tabs. The first one, Job Properties, lists a number of attributes of the job, including the frame range and the command and/or scene file used.
The next two are useful for finding out what went wrong with jobs that fail (or getting logging information from jobs that succeed). Most output will go to the first tab, Output Log. Some programs will send error messages and other information to a separate stream, which goes to the Error Log. Scroll to the bottom of either of these - error messages are coded in red, warnings in yellow and info (as determined by the program being run) in green. All of the tabs and their uses are explained in more detail in the User's Guide.
Submitting New Jobs
The Artist View UI can be used to submit jobs to Qube, through the Submit menu item at the top. However, in most cases you will be setting Qube up to allow submission directly from your application, such as Maya or 3dsMax. Submitting directly from applications was covered in the previous section. However, you can still use the UI to submit test jobs, to make sure that things are still working as expected, and to submit jobs for applications where you haven't installed the inApp interface.
The Frames Panel
The right side of the Artist View UI contains the Frames panel, which lists information about all the frames in the selected job. Notice that it has a separate refresh button, which allows you to query the status of just those frames. You can also right-mouse on any of the frames and kill them, retry them, suspend (block) them (and then unblock them), as well as marking them complete.