Automatic Submission Prefixing
When jobs are submitted the the queue, you often want project or scene specific information in the submission name so you can differentiate on the queue - 'Diffuse' might be the pass name in many scenes, and 15 'Diffuse's on the queue doesn't help figure out which ones they are.
To help with this, RPManager has a 'Prefix' data field: just below and to the right of the main pass list. The contents of this field are added to the start of the submitted job name, ie if your pass is 'Diffuse', and your prefix is 'WS003', your submitted job will be named 'WS003-Diffuse'.
This prefix value is global for the current scene, not per pass.
Entering this data in the first place can be a little tedious, and if you want to use the scene version number as well then largely tedious - and reusing a scene might mean the wrong prefix is attached until it is noticed and rectified. To avoid this there is an auto-prefixing option that, depending on your max scene name structure, can take the hassle out of keeping this string updated.
If the prefix is of the format
#filteredscenename_X_X
it is replaced with a filtered version of the max scene name. The X and X are replace with integers that control how the scene name is used.
The way it works is that first the scene name is tokenised using '-', '_' and '.'. ie if your scene name was WS_003-SC34_v001, it would be divided up by the _ and - characters into a 4 element array: #(“WS”, “003”, “SC34”, v001“).
The two integers are then used to control which of these elements are used for the prefix. The first number is how many from the left, and the second now many from the right. ie if you had
#filteredscenename_2_1
for the above example, it would take the first two and the last element, and add them back together using the '_' character. So your final submitted job might be
WS_003_v001-Diffuse
Then, if you incrementally saved your scene and submitted, it would be
WS_003_v002-Diffuse
without having to edit anything.
The other time saving features is that you can set it up so that all new scenes are created with the #filteredscenename setup that you want, by setting a .ini key in the maxroot/scripts/RenderPassManager.ini file. There is no UI for this edit (I probably should do one) but if you edit the file manually, and in the 'Defaults' key named 'PrefixDefault'.
ie
[Defaults]
PrefixDefault=#filteredscenename_2_1
cheers, grant