Automatically generate UNC paths for output?

[gardocki]

Maybe this feature already exists somewhere but it would be really great if Phoenix could default to using the UNC network path of the scene folder instead of the local path. The extra step of having to change the sim output means we've lost a lot of time to human error when simulating and rendering, only to find that the frame are blank because the server farm didn't know where to look.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hmm, not sure if I understand you correctly. The scene would not have a UNC path unless you manually place it in a shared folder on the network or on a mapped drive. If it's a mapped drive, it doesn't even need to be UNC, as long as the drive path is available on all farm machines - e.g. X:\some_folder\ would work too if all machines have a mapped X: drive corresponding to a network directory.

[gardocki]

If it's a mapped drive, it doesn't even need to be UNC, as long as the drive path is available on all farm machines - e.g. X:\some_folder\ would work too if all machines have a mapped X: drive corresponding to a network directory.

This is exactly how our machines are set up, but it doesn't work because $(scene_dir) changes when render or sim jobs are submitted to backburner. We have to manually input the UNC path. It also doesn't work for distributed rendering even though all the machines have the same local path to the network drive.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, it won't work for DR because the scene gets copied around, and the caches are no longer in the directory next to it.

[flipbook]

For me its just automatic to go straight to the output section and change upon every new PHX sim. I suppose being allowed to set a default path would be handy.