DR missing textures, even though i think i mapped them right

[pailhead]

I am trying to render across 4 computers. My main one has a shared drive, and it's mapped as S: on all of those computers.

I've gathered all my textures into one folder on that S: drive, and the path goes just like that - "S:\folder\texture.jpg". Is this supposed to be enough? At first it didnt work, then using the asset tracker i highlighted all of those textures, and said 'resolve to UNC location'.

After that it worked.

But now i can't get it to work again.

What am i doing wrong?

[MoonDoggie]

If you remote login to all the machines can they see the correct paths?

[pailhead]

Yes,

I've just tried one, they all have my drive mapped as S:.

DR doesnt work with either computername\\ nor S:\.

[instinct]

is the DR user the same user as the user you are loging in with ? just a shot in the dark.

Regards,
Thorsten

[pailhead]

It should be, only one user at this machine.

[pailhead]

*scratch this one out*

[ruud3dv]

If you run the spawner as a service on the slaves, make sure it uses the useraccount, by default it'll have the 'Local Systemaccount' as logon.

Change it to the users profile in Administrative Tools -> Services. That way it will have the same rights as the user regarding file/network access.

[pailhead]

I don't understand the whole user/services concept. Each computer has only one user set, and it's an admin account.

[pailhead]

It worked fine yesterday.

[pailhead]

When i open the scene from the slave machine, it reads the textures fine even though they are mapped to a network drive, no problems what so ever.

[ruud3dv]

There's a difference between 'you' starting a program and a service being started automatically, they can use different credentials and thus have different rights regarding network/file-access.
On the slaves: disable the spawner in 'Services' and start it manually from the start-menu. See if that makes a difference.

Btw: I use the Relink Bitmaps-script from Moondoggie to reassign UNC-paths to bitmaps, works like a charm.

[pailhead]

I was starting it manually from the start-menu, but right after the install i went to 'register vrayspawner as service'.


Like i said, it worked like a charm yesterday. Even now, using the same scene from yesterday it actually works, all the slaves load the textures.

But, the same scene, just a later save (i worked on it today) produces these problems. All of the maps (same maps) are mapped in the same way, one works, the other one doesnt.

[MoonDoggie]

Thanks for your kind words ruud3dv, here's a link to the relink script if you can use it, read the install instructions:

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/relink-bitmaps

[pailhead]

I think ruudys suggestion solved the problem. I am still a bit confused, because i think that even before i had done what he suggested, i could render the scene that i've set up previously, with no problems.

[tricky]

We've just switched over to running spawner as a service because we wanted to use pstools to start/stop spawner with one click from a workstation. When we made the switch, we had mixed luck in getting DR to behave. Sometimes it would work. And next time some of the buckets would be missing textures. Very strange.

So, I tried changing all bitmap paths to UNC (using asset tracking) and so far (a few hours later at any rate) it seems to be a lot more stable. No more missing textures.....so far!