Simple, powerful, central management
Any property of any Engine or any Job can be viewed and configured from any other node. You can configure groups of Engines at one time, and you can use defaults and presets for both Engines and Jobs to simplify how you configure things. The GUI is streamlined for the kind of work your artists need to actually do with the renders, like checking the frames and finding the causes of render errors and problems.

The Conspectus component displays the status of all of your Engines as an easy to read graph showing the CPU and memory usage for each node in real time. This makes monitoring your machines as simple as scanning a graph. See the screenshots for a simple example.

This powerful management can be restricted for your artists, so that they can not change things you don't want them to change. You can always enter "administrator mode" on any node to return it to full system access. Combine this with the simplified service/daemon installation system, and you have a tool ideal for quickly deploying into a shared lab environment so you can turn your work labs into a giant renderfarm when no one is using them.

Handles Any Render Pipeline
Smedge ships with a large variety of Modules to control most of today's popular animation and compositing tools. Most of the application specific Modules can be easily customized to add new versions easily. For more pipeline specific customization, a system of "Virtual Modules" can be used to streamline Job submission and error detection.

There is a component that can monitor the system and respond to any event in the Job and Work lifecycle with arbitary actions, including sending emails or running scripts. You can also attach arbitrary command line operations to events on a Job by Job basis as part of the basic Job data. Finally, if you really want to go to town, you can use the Smedge API to write your own Modules that can do anything you can dream of with a computer.

Smedge currently includes Modules to render:

• 3D Studio Max
• After Effects
• Air
• Alias Studio
• Aqsis
• Blender
• Cinema 4D
• Combustion
• Digital Fusion
• finalRender for Maya
• Gelato
• Houdini
• Lightwave
• Maxwell Light Simulator
• Maya
• MayaMan
• mental ray for Maya
• mental ray standalone
• Nuke
• RenderMan for Maya
• Rendition
• Shake
• Turtle for Maya
• V-Ray for Maya
• Viz
• Vue
• XSI
• And anything else that you can control from a commandline

Production Tested
Smedge has been in production use for over 10 years. It is currently in producton use at top production facilities, education facilities, and commercial render farms all around the world. Users have had hundreds of machines running thousands of jobs and millions of frames, of all possible resolutions.

Powerful and Intuitive GUI
Smedge includes a graphical Shell application that allows you full control over every aspect of your system, in a format that allows you to see the status of anything with ease. Yet it also includes integrated security that allows you to limit the amount of control that users have. It has a powerful interface for editing Jobs and the ability to quickly and easily configure all settings for all of your engines at one time. The GUI, as with any Shell application, will automatically have the ability to submit and control any new Products you develop, maintaining a consistent and understandable interface for your users.

There are also extra graphic Shell programs that allow customized interaction, including the Herald, which you can configure to respond to Job or Work events with one of several actions. Actions available range from displaying a message or playing a sound to sending an email, executing a command or saving Job or Work information to a file.

Ready for automation
Smedge ships with a suite of commandline driven Shell programs, giving you the tools you need to deeply integrate Smedge into your full production pipeline with simple batch scripts, built-in scripting languages in third-party applications (like MEL), or through any programming language you please. Included Shells:

ConfigureMaster
Used to control Master distribution options, type options, restrictions and licensing.

Engine
Used to list and control the operation of Engines.

Job
Used to list and control the operation of Jobs, or to display information about the installed Products.

PoolManager
Used to list information about the Pools.

Submit
Used to submit Jobs into the system.

Seamless cross-platform operation
All Smedge components are designed to work seamless across platforms. You can run any component on any type of machine and all of your machines will automatically integrate with each other. You can also set up automatic path translations across platforms so that when you submit a Job from Windows with a drive letter, the Linux clients will be able to find the same file with the correct Unix style path.