Textures not rendering

[beaker66uk]

Hi all, I have a small render farm with 4 machines in it.

Two dual core machines with 3Gb memory

Two p4 machines with 3 Gb memory.

I have a large scene which I am sending to all four machines. It renders perfectly on the first dual core machine, but on the second one some of the textures render as plain grey.

The same is true on the p4 machines - one renders perfectly, the second renders some of the texture plain grey.

I know this is not a memory issue, and all the machines are set up the same with Max 8 and VRAY 1.5 RC2 loaded.

Can anyone give me some guidance?

Best regards

Ken White

[jacksc02]

ken it sounds like the render nodes cant see the the texture maps.
Could you explain your network set up so we can help out?

[Candelero]

ken it sounds like the render nodes cant see the the texture maps.
Could you explain your network set up so we can help out?

Second that...
Here's what you can do.
Load the scene (via the network) - if you have a warning about missing maps, locate them and re-save your scene. Or just add the paths in the max customization.

Retry rendering after setting this.

Best regards,
nikki Candelero

[jacksc02]

yup what he said

[beaker66uk]

All our texture maps are held on a central Win2K server which all the machines have the same access to.

The scene itself is held on a different server, but again, all machines have the same access to it.

I'm testing the network access now, so I'll get back to you soon. Thanks for the ideas.

Ken[/img]

[beaker66uk]

D'urh! OK I win the idiot award. Those two machines didn't have the paths included in the "customize paths" selection in MAX.

Thanks for your help guys!

Ken

[jacksc02]

at least it was something simple

[silver]

what if we had the paths all right, and the render sometimes go fine and sometimes just miss buckets? i ahve to reset irradiance map to get it to work, this seems really weird. the paths are ok, because u have already got the same scene rendered well

[cristoforo]

It is not necessary to have all paths mapped under the customize paths setting. At a certain point you hit a limit to the number of paths you can set....which has happened to me. As long as you use the correct network path to your server, which is the same that all the computers see, when you apply the material, all the computers will read the correct path. Everything has worked fine for me. Now, suddenly though, DR is not reading all the materials from the render slaves and rendering grey without materials. When I go to each computer and render, all is fine. There is something strange with DR. This happening to others also?