Publish renders to Autodesk Flow Production Tracking from Deadline Cloud

The blender_turntable_to_flow job bundle on the GitHub website 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. For more information about Flow Production Tracking, see Flow Production Tracking overview on the Autodesk website.

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