Add support for job dependencies and AYON publishing options in deadline_rop

[Valhannal]

While working with our studio pipeline and AYON in Houdini, I’ve come across a few challenges and potential improvements that could greatly streamline artist workflows:

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  1. Job Dependencies Missing When Submitting to Deadline

In Houdini, it’s often necessary to use job dependencies when submitting multiple jobs (e.g., caches and final renders) in a single submission.
However, the current AYON submission workflow doesn’t seem to support this.

Our workaround is:

• Submit cache/geo jobs via vanilla deadline_rop, which doesn’t publish to AYON,

• Submit final render_rop job through AYON, which is then published.
  

  

  2. Add AYON Tab to deadline_rop
     An alternative would be to extend the default deadline_rop with AYON support, as proposed by @MustafaJafar.
     This would allow artists to configure everything in one place and still benefit from dependencies and AYON publishing.
     

     

  3. Improve and Integrate Custom ayon_publish_rop
     There is already a great starting point here:
     Procedural Publishing: AYON Publish ROP by Lypsolon · Pull Request #122 · ynput/ayon-houdini · GitHub
     Integrating and polishing this tool as a standard part of the repo could cover most of the use cases we need – especially for multi-stage submissions (e.g., sim → render → review) with dependencies.

In our current Flow (ShotGrid) setup, we’ve developed a custom Deadline event plugin that:

• Automatically creates .mp4 previews after render jobs complete
• Publishes them to Flow
• Is implemented at: our_deadline_repo/custom/events
  This script is tailored to our pipeline, which focuses mostly on render submissions from tools like Houdini, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Fusion, After Effects, and Nuke – without heavy asset publishing.

Now that we’re moving to AYON, we want to align our pipeline as closely as possible with the new system.
A more advanced version of our current script – adapted for AYON – could handle automatic preview generation and publishing, while supporting AYON’s job metadata and project structure. This would fit nicely into option 2 above (AYON-enabled deadline_rop).

I’m also happy to contribute directly and help develop or test these improvements, and submit any resulting tools back to the GitHub repo.

Looking forward to your feedback

[mustafa_jafar]

Hello,
Thank you for your great suggestions.

@Valhannal

Our workaround is:

• Submit cache/geo jobs via vanilla deadline_rop, which doesn’t publish to AYON,
• Submit final render_rop job through AYON, which is then published.

Would mind creating new request on our new feedback portal
Go to AYON Feedback and create a new request

[mustafa_jafar]

@Valhannal

Improve and Integrate Custom ayon_publish_rop
There is already a great starting point here:
Procedural Publishing: AYON Publish ROP by Lypsolon · Pull Request #122 · ynput/ayon-houdini · GitHub
Integrating and polishing this tool as a standard part of the repo could cover most of the use cases we need – especially for multi-stage submissions (e.g., sim → render → review) with dependencies.

You can add your thoughts about it here Create AYON Publish ROP node | AYON Feedback

[mustafa_jafar]

@Valhannal

Add AYON Tab to deadline_rop
An alternative would be to extend the default deadline_rop with AYON support, as proposed by @MustafaJafar.
This would allow artists to configure everything in one place and still benefit from dependencies and AYON publishing.

For information, This one requires wrapping/modifiying the native DL submitter node. which may be diffcult to maintain over time.

[mustafa_jafar]

@Valhannal

In our current Flow (ShotGrid) setup, we’ve developed a custom Deadline event plugin that:

• Automatically creates .mp4 previews after render jobs complete
• Publishes them to Flow
• Is implemented at: our_deadline_repo/custom/events
  This script is tailored to our pipeline, which focuses mostly on render submissions from tools like Houdini, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Fusion, After Effects, and Nuke – without heavy asset publishing.

When marking any render as review in the AYON publisher, it’ll be process using or review extraction workflow as follows:

1. Apply colorspace transforms using Extract OIIO Transcode
2. Convert to video using Extract Review
3. Add burnins using Extract Buurnins.
4. add publish tags, which can mark your converted media to be upload to AYON or flow/shotgrid.