What's New in Qube 6.9
Metered Licensing
The release of Qube 6.9 includes a new option for expanding your render capacity, Qube Metered Licensing. Metered Licensing lets you burst to as many resources as you need while always prioritizing your existing paid Qube! licenses. It's billed monthly in arrears by the minute at a rate of $0.10 per hour for the total minutes used in that month.
Enable metered licensing for your site, set your own limits, and track your usage up to the last 15 minutes on our metered licensing portal at http://metered.pipelinefx.com
Cross-cluster job priorities
Now in Qube 6.9, a job can be set to have the same priority across all clusters. Prior to this release, a job could only be highest priority in its own cluster, and had to accept running at a reduced priority in other clusters.
Cluster priorities now allow you to use wildcards, by using a + character at the end of a cluster name, to match several clusters. Multiple clusters can also be specified by separating them with commas.
For example, specifying a job's cluster as /+ and a priority of 1 would allow the job to run as priority 1 in all clusters on the farm.
Authenticated SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) Support
We've added SMTP Auth support over SSL and TLS connections. This allows the supervisor to send mail through your ISP's email server, customers no longer have to have an in-house SMTP relay.
New environment variables exposed during the execution of job instances and pre/postflights
QB_FRAME_PADDING
QB_PADDED_FRAME_NUMBER
QB_PADDED_FRAME_START
QB_PADDED_FRAME_END
QB_PADDED_FRAME_STEP
New Supervisor and Worker startup parameter
The Qube supervisor and worker now accept a --conf argument for specifying the location of the qb.conf configuration file.
Updates to Application Support
Autodesk 3DS Max and Maya 2017 Support
Integrated and BatchRender jobs have been update for the Autodesk 2017 release cycle.
Katana submission interface
Deeply integrated submission from both inside Katana and also through ArtistView
Redshift Renderer - efficient GPU scheduling
Our new Redshift integration provides the ability to schedule a number of GPU's in a worker ("give me any 2 GPUS's"), compared to having to specify GPU affinity ("I must have GPU's 1 & 2"), allowing for more efficient use of multi-GPU hosts.
Full Maya production support available in Qube 6.9 after a limited beta in Qube 6.8-3.
Autodesk VRED 2017
A myriad of changes from Autodesk for this version; in relation to Qube!, the submission UI is the most noticeable adjustment.
Modo
Added support for multi-channel EXR's