I uploaded my job, but it doesn’t seem to be doing anything. Why?

For starters, please understand that we can only report progress in the queue viewer as either frames or tiles complete. Frames or tiles that are currently rendering will not have their progress collected or reported. There are far too many unique methods that render engines use to report their progress, if they report it at all. Hence, it’s not realistic to attempt to relay that information to you.

Second, if you have submitted a single frame render job that is not tiled (see this page to discover how we handle tile rendering), that single frame is rendering on only one node. Given the information immediately above, there will be nothing to report until that one frame is done…at which point the only thing to report is that it is 100% complete. Use the Show Logs option when you right-click the job to see if the render application itself is reporting any progress.

Third, take a glance at the Farm Load meters in the upper-right corner of the queue viewer window. If most or all of them are lit up, then the farm is under heavy load. If you submitted your job at a low power level, the proportional amount of compute power it receives (given the other jobs running on the farm) may be less than 1 node. If that is the case, no nodes will be processing your job at that exact moment. As the farm load lessens, your job will begin to see compute power being given to it and progress will be made as a result. If there are higher power jobs than yours in the queue that have long slice times (the amount of time it takes to complete one frame or tile of the job), then it may be some time before nodes become available to process your job. Please be patient, as our queuing mechanism automatically insures your job will receive what is fair given its power level and the power levels of the other jobs on the farm. If you are in a hurry or under a deadline, please increase the power setting of the job.

Lastly on this topic, since we report Cost Consumed in the queue viewer, if the cost is slowly incrementing over time, your job is being rendered. If there is no reported Cost Consumed for your job yet, it either doesn’t have a high enough power setting to take computing resources away from the other jobs in the queue or those computing resources are tied up in longer running slices.