Blender work is not a shot submission: no Export, no version, no
validation, QC or delivery. It is "Ctrl+F12, but on the farm", so it is
modelled as what it is — a queue entry and nothing more.
That turned out to need very little. Claim, progress, fail and
complete-render already tolerated a job with no Export behind them, so a
Blender job reuses the whole lifecycle; RenderJob gains projectId, label
and submittedBy so a job with no shot code still has something to show.
Capability gating is new and was already missing: the claim now filters
job types by the machine's reported tools. Without it a workstation
without Blender would claim Blender work and fail it repeatedly, burning
the attempts while a machine that could have rendered it sat idle. The
worker asks for Blender jobs unconditionally and the server refuses them
— trusting the worker to self-select would have left the same hole.
The runner treats a clean exit with no saved frames as a failure:
Blender exits 0 when a frame range is empty or an output path is
unwritable, and a job that silently rendered nothing is the worst
outcome available.
Standalone jobs auto-requeue on a transient failure like any other work;
delivery builds are deliberately excluded, since a half-written package
wants a human first.
Adds the Blender add-on (BlenderPanel/) and its docs. The add-on refuses
to submit an unsaved file — the farm opens the .blend from disk, so
unsaved changes would render the previous state without warning. Its
payload is pinned by a contract test, since add-on and server only ever
meet over JSON.
Worker 1.5.0. Adds migration 20260815000000_blender_render_jobs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One "Queue Export" click now renders the EXR sequence, then rebuilds the shot
headlessly with the studio slate/overlay template to produce the delivery MOV
and review MP4. Implements RenderPipeline2 phases 1-2 plus the preview stage.
Server:
- New models Export, RenderJob, ExportEvent, Machine, WorkerHeartbeat, plus
Project.deliveryConfig and per-submission slate fields (Export.vfxScope,
Export.submissionNote, inherited from the shot's previous export).
Both migrations are purely additive; no existing column is touched.
- lib/render-pipeline: server-enforced state machine, transactional version
increment with supersede, atomic FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED claim gated by
machine availability windows, and a lease reaper run from instrumentation.ts.
- /api/ext/* endpoints for the panel and workers; session-auth mirrors under
/api/render and /api/machines for the web UI.
- Pipeline pages: render queue, export detail, machine monitoring, plus an
Exports tab on shot detail.
RenderWorker (.NET 8 Windows service, new):
- Registration, heartbeat as cancel channel, claim loop, aerender runner with
progress parsing and stall watchdog, crash recovery and disk-spooled
reporting that survives server downtime.
- Preview stage: headless AE assembles the preview comp into a throwaway AEP
with both output modules queued, then a single aerender pass renders them.
Preview jobs are not claimed while an interactive AE session is open, so an
artist's project is never taken over.
AE panel: Queue Export with live status polling, urgent flag, retry, and the
VFX Scope / Submission Note fields. Every existing panel action is unchanged.
Preview chaining ships disabled behind SystemConfig preview.enabled.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
twotalesanimation