Monthly Archives: November 2012

Softimage network licenses explained…visually with ICE

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A couple of weeks ago on si-community, there was a discussion of Softimage licensing and someone wished there was a graphic that explained Softimage licensing…

A network license includes one Softimage license, and five Batch licenses.

  • The Softimage license is the “interactive” license: it allows you to run xsi.exe on one computer.
  • The Batch licenses run xsibatch, and are used for command-line rendering on render nodes. One Batch license = one render node.

Each instance of xsi.exe and xsibatch.exe can use up to four satellite computers for satellite rendering.
network-licenses-satellite

You can run multiple copies of xsi.exe or xsibatch.exe on the same computer. A license is shared as long as processes are running under the same user account and on the same host (aka computer).

You can run an unlimited number of xsibatch -processing jobs. With xsibatch -processing, you can do anything except render. Typically you use it to run script jobs on scene files.

And finally, you can also use the Softimage license to run xsibatch.

Update: As requested in the comments, here’s six render nodes, each using four satellite computers:
network-license-rendernodes-w-satellite

Getting the ICE tree view from a menu callback

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How do you get the ICE Tree view in a menu callback? For example, if you add a menu item to the ICE Tree > User Tools, how does the menu item callback get the ICE Tree view?

The answer is actually in code I posted before, but that was in a blog post titled Getting the selected ICE nodes. So, with that title, you wouldn’t necessarily think to look there.

So what’s the answer? Uses Context.GetAttribute( “Target” ). For custom menus in the views like the ICE Tree view, the Fcurve Editor, and the Material Manager, the Target attribute is the View object. And once you have the View object, you can get the View attributes.

#
# Callback added to the menu item with Menu.AddCallbackItem
#
def My_menuItem_Callback( in_ctxt ):

	# Get the ICE Tree view
	oView = in_ctxt.GetAttribute("Target")
	
	# 
	LogMessage( 'View: ' + oView.Name )
	
	# get the selected nodes
	nodes = oView.GetAttributeValue('selection')
	LogMessage( 'Selected nodes: ' + nodes )

Soapbox alert…
This post illustrates why indexes are a good thing…with them, you can find information no matter what page or heading contains the information.
For ICE trees, you’d have index entries something like this:

  • ICE tree
    • view attributes
      • target
      • container
    • selected nodes, getting
    • view, getting
    • ICETree node, getting