OpenCue on Ubuntu 24.04

Overview

OpenCue is the open source render management system that studios use to turn a pile of machines into a render farm. Artists and pipeline tools submit a job made of layers and frames, and OpenCue's scheduler decides which render node runs which frame, when, and with how much memory and how many cores. It tracks every frame through the queue, retries the ones that fail, records the logs, and reports what the farm is doing in real time, so a shot that needs thousands of frames finishes without anyone shepherding it by hand.

Originally built and run in production at Sony Pictures Imageworks and now an Academy Software Foundation project, OpenCue is designed for the scale and the priorities of real production: shows, shots and departments, allocations and subscriptions that decide who gets the cores, per service memory and core minimums, and job dependencies. It suits VFX and animation studios, virtual production teams, architectural visualisation shops and any organisation running batch compute that needs to be queued, prioritised and traced.

Common uses

• Queue and dispatch VFX, animation and visual effects renders across your own render nodes
• Prioritise work by show, shot and department with per allocation core subscriptions
• Track every frame, retry failures and read render logs from one web interface

See it running

Real screenshots taken while testing this image against its deployment guide.