It's about time, AWS...

Deadline 10.4.0.10¶
This is a hotfix release to address issues in the Karma plugin and the Repository installer.

Application Plugin Improvements¶
Karma

Added Houdini Karma submitter and plugin.
Fixed the bug where the frames argument was missing from the Karma standalone plugin.

But I think this still can't submit from within houdini with a Deadline-ROP which makes it not so useful.

I very much hope(d) that Houdini would bring out its own queue by now. I just want to click a button to put a job in the queue that gets rendered in the background. I know deadline is good for large production houses but it's unnecessary for me to have all these dials and knobs. Is Hque something I should look into?

Deadline is not just for large production houses. We've been using it for at least a decade now as a small shop. I would even use it if I was a freelancer. It used to be brilliant, with the move to "free" however, not so much. It basically meant they stopped support for it... a shame really. Houdini Karma/Solaris not having a proper submitter for deadline is frankly a big issue for us and hqueue unfortunately can't compensate that.

Not sure if you are aware, but there is an unsupported submitter (including a deadline rop) based on the free husk plugin for deadline. Moise Moshev from Bottleship was nice enough to release a version of their internal submitter (which is basically a patched up version of the original deadline rop). We use this and it works pretty well (allthough it is missing some functionality). You can find it here: https://forums.thinkboxsoftware.com/t/official-houdini-solaris-husk-submitter/30214 [forums.thinkboxsoftware.com]

Having said that, I would still prefer to have a supported submitter (including a ROP node) - not necessarily from AWS (looking at you, SideFX).