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Publish renders to Autodesk Flow Production Tracking from Deadline Cloud - Deadline Cloud

Publish renders to Autodesk Flow Production Tracking from Deadline Cloud

The blender_turntable_to_flow job bundle demonstrates how to integrate Deadline Cloud with Autodesk Flow Production Tracking (formerly ShotGrid). The bundle renders frames, encodes a review-ready movie, extracts a thumbnail, and publishes the result to Flow as a new Version on an Asset's review Task. The render step uses a Blender turntable as a placeholder — replace it with any renderer to adapt this pattern for your pipeline.

The bundle demonstrates two core patterns for render-and-publish pipelines on Deadline Cloud:

  • Post-render work modeled as discrete job steps (movie encode, thumbnail generation, publish) that are independently observable, retryable, and schedulable.

  • Chained, dependent, non-render tasks that run after a render and fan out in parallel.

The step graph:

RenderTurntable  (one task per frame)
   ├─ GenerateMovie      (ffmpeg frames → H.264 mp4)
   ├─ GenerateThumbnail  (mid frame → jpg)
   └─ PublishToFlow      (depends on movie + thumbnail)

The job needs Blender, FFmpeg, and Python. Configure a conda queue environment with blender ffmpeg python>=3.10 pip on channels deadline-cloud conda-forge. Flow credentials are stored in AWS Secrets Manager (Secrets Manager) and read at runtime by the queue role.

A submission hook (hooks.yaml) reads Flow parameters from environment variables (FLOW_PROJECT_ID, FLOW_ASSET_NAME, FLOW_SECRET_ARN) so artists don't manually enter project metadata. Enable bundle hooks before first use:

deadline config set settings.allow_bundle_hooks true

Submit the job:

deadline bundle gui-submit blender_turntable_to_flow