Welcome to the first release of Muster 9. Muster 9 has been completely redesigned and optimized with the inclusion of long waited features requested by users during the life cycle of Muster 8.
Since Muster 9.0.2, regular databases or sqlite files can be automatically upgraded from Muster. You'll need databases and queues starting from version 8.5+
We have included a gorgeous images and sequences viewer totally integrated inside Muster. You can now preview your frames while being rendered as well as preview completed sequences. The image viewer supports the most used images formats including OpenEXR with HDR support and has direct bindings with your jobs, you can re queue individual frames and/or chunks directly from the image viewer window. We also extended the preview feature to the Chunks Details view. You can watch real time updated thumbnails inside the view and directly re queue chunks and/or frames. The image viewer is totally OpenGL accelerated and supports GPU and RAM caching to watch sequences with their native frame rate
The web interface has been rewritten from scratch. While being more minimalist, it has been designed for fully responsiveness for mobile devices and it is based on the Twitter Bootstrap technology. It is also an excellent point of start for your own interfaces based on the REST APIs (distributed in a non-minimized form)
Muster now supports IPV6 as well as double stack bindings. It is also possible to bind the network ports to a specific IP address / network interface
A new backup facility has been included. This is totally different from the archive operation that still exists, but while an archived job still stays into the queue, the backup database can be used to completely remove no longer needed jobs and restore them later if required.
General redesign and optimization of the internal data. Now Muster is able to read and write queue objects concurrently and the overall speed increased by an average 300%
Engines (templates) now supports multi versioning. You can easily define multiple version of an engine and configure multiple paths according in the client preferences. This is completely handled in the templates configuration dialog and requires just one single template. Double check the templates documentation to implement versioning in your existing custom templates
Chunks support prioritization. During jobs submissions you can specify how chunks will be processed providing several predefined priority modes
Single frames renders (image slicing) now supports submitting multiple frames in a single job
Muster now supports frame ranges instead of the fixed start-end frame logic. You can input a frame range in the form 1-10b1n1p4 , where b, n and p specify by frame, start numbering and padding. Also separate frames list are supported like 1,5,20-30. Check the templates documentation to understand how to migrate your existing templates
The queue supports an emergency mode. This is a completely isolated queue that runs on an higher priority than the regular queue. It is also possible to abort regular queue jobs if emergency queue has pending jobs
The mails templates no longer exist. Mails notifications are now sent and built through the global template(0) with access to the Muster inner objects. This opens to a total customization of the mails sent by the Dispatcher
The dispatcher mailer daemon now supports TLS/SSL configurations through libcurl. It is no longer required to run a forwarder for mail servers that requires authentication
The entire frames check logic has been rewritten from scratch and now supports file opening, OpenEXR files and frame ranges/lists. Also the frame check can be run again against a completed job
Notifications have gone through a complete review with the users and groups system. You can now configure specific notifications for each group and user as well as inherit values from groups. Also Muster now offers to configure notifications via mails, notificator, or mobiles (mobile app will come later)
Users and groups permissions have been revamped and now offers a preview of the inherited properties during configuration
It's now possible to completely remap hot keys into Console and bind them to a custom workspace
Muster can now parse multiple output folders according to the template settings. If a template supports multi-layered rendering and supports outputting multiple output folders, the frames checks and the frames mask are setup according
Templates supports macros that may be edited interactively and then accesses through the templates codes
The log parsing and reporting has been completely revamped. Now a strict relation between the errors in the logs files and the chunk is preserved. You no longer get a single log line for a failed chunk, but a complete error reporting available in the chunks view with an entry for each faulty line. Also it's possible to create overrides rules for each template and/or job to skip specific warnings and errors, or to include new checkings
Jobs support chunks parallel dependencies. You can have two jobs running simultaneous with a 1:1 dependence between their chunks
Multitask templates are now available. You can build a template that runs several different tasks chained by dependencies and/or return values
OpenEXR is supported in all image based operations as well as in single frames slicing and assembling. Templates have been updated according
You can now run each database on a different connection and on a different engine. This allows i.e. to run the regular queue on sqlite while keeping the history and the backup database on Mysql
Several warnings and checks related to chained jobs have been implemented. Now Muster requests a confirmation to delete jobs dependacies too
Jobs can be filtered by ID in the jobs view
The status of the nodes is now stored inside the database for off-line query
A inheritable maximum priority value is now available for users and groups
Jobs implement extra fields like camera left/right/center , sequences and shots
Bulk operations are now available on folders with fast child selection context menu options
The Console submission view is now foldable
Start and end time estimation on folders is now available
Headers customization can be reset to the default values
Fixed an issue that reported a wrong disk usage in the instances details
User preferences can be read/write from a different path using an environmental variable or a command line switch
Automatic removal and archiving of jobs can be triggered depending on the job status or directly from a specific template using dedicated class members
It's now possible to re-index the database with a specific option
Some warnings can now be skipped and configured i.e. when submitting a job using a local path
The Max connector now supports images slicing
Fixed an issue in the workstation logs view where the logs were not deleted properly
Network ports changed from 97XX to 98XX to allow running version 8.X and 9.X side by side
Changed the way preferences are stored on the Mac and Linux platforms, files are no longer saved with backslashes but the final folder is normalized according
Tuning settings for the Dispatcher and the instances are now exposed to optimize heavily loaded systems.
The LDAP query configuration has been optimized to supports different configurations and it produced standard queries that should be more compatible with existing LDAP systems
The Maximum instance limit on a user or group can now be ignored if available instances are found
Single instances and broadcast templates now supports the instance job progress
All the external applications connectors have been updated to support the new “template version” field
Mrtool now accepts multiple IDs (comma separated) for operations on jobs and instances