Note for visualisers using design extension

[mossy]

I know there are many visualisers here using Vray so i thought i might put this topic up as it has plagued my vray network rendering for a while and i could not find any information on it myself. Its to do with the Design extension plugin for max, it was giving me errors on all my rendering machines (bitarray.cpp error and missing filelink.dlu) when i sent a project from a my local machine (which uses full license max and design extension.)
It seems that des. ext. requires a full version of max to install as it opens max during installation. Obviously when you just run the network rendering install of max on the render nodes you cannot install des. ext. properly as it can't initialise max. I thought that i could get around this problem by just copying the plugins from my local machine to the render nodes but this just gives me filelink.dlu could not initialise. Anyway, it turns out that the render nodes don't actually need the plugin but an empty folder named filelink placed in the stdplugs in the max directory (why this is so I have not found out yet ) and then it renders fine fingers crossed there will be no more problems.... I will try and put this up on the discreet support site too to get some more answers

[proces2]

thank you for posting this!!

i've been running into all sorts of problems using a render farm to render out an animation. i think this answers some of the problems we've had. i use max 5.1 with des. ext. and the render farm did have trouble getting the des. ext. to install on the slave machines.

with these errors you were encountering - did you ever get a windows c++ runtime library error. that's another error that we keep getting on the server machines. not sure if that relates to the des. ext. bug.

sean

[mossy]

Yeah i was getting the 'bitarray.cpp' assertion failure each time from every server, which seems to have gone now i put the filelink folder in. Also, each version of Vray you have installed on the servers has to be identical version e.g. 1.09d should be on them all or that server will come back failing or just say 'finished rendering'. I know FR does this too.

[proces2]

we did the routine that you described, but are still getting the filelink failed to initialize error. we have the filelink.dlu in the stdplugs folder (without it just kept saying 'filelink is missing') and an empty filelink folder in the same place. but, still the 'failed to initialize' error comes up. anything else you may have done in your trial and error process that you may not have listed in your initial post?

do you play around with the 3dsmax.ini file at all on the server machine?

sean

[mossy]

I think that most of the objects in my test scene have been merged into the file now which may severe the link to the plugin? - I don't normally have to change anything on the server .ini files but it might be a way to sort out your problem.
Ok, i have thought of a rough way round your problem - see if this works if you have not tried it already: input the plugin location on your network (UNC naming) to a registered version of max with a working copy of filelink.dlu into the plugin.ini on the server machine for example \\mymaxmachine\c$\3dsmax5\plugins\filelink.dlu and see if it picks it up?

I will try and test this out again because i am sure that i will have the same problem as you are having with a future project.

[Dschaga]

from viz4 side i can give you a hint:

there is a filelink.dlu and a folder "filelink" with the files adttrans.dlu and maplink.dlu.

Without these two file the filelink.dlo can't load.