Missing Maps - Distributed Rendering... Yes, again.

[rmaytee]

I know similar issues have been posted a million times. What bothers me, is that I have all the maps on a shared drive. All machines have access to the drive. All texture maps are correctly mapped in the material. However, I still get some machines that can't see the maps. The really dumb part is, in my system settings, below the distributed rendering settings, there is an options to enable "check for missing maps." Some scenes, if there are any missing maps, it will not render until you either locate the missing maps, or tell v-ray to render the scene anyway. Other scenes, even though that option is enabled, the scene renders, but the v-ray messages window will give a warning that there are missing maps found, and the node will fail to render. Well, what the heck did I have you check for missing maps for, if you aren't going to tell me what maps are missing?

I really get tired of the hang-ups with v-ray's distributed rendering. I hoped the bugs would have been eliminated when I upgraded to the newest release.

[vlado]

It's quite inappropriate to blame V-Ray for this. We have no control whatsoever on bitmap textures - all of this is handled by 3ds Max on the one side, and on lower level by Windows on the other. You will have the same issues no matter what renderer you use. The most reliable way to avoid issues like this is to have copies of the textures locally on each slave.

You can check the V-Ray log file of the particular slave to see what maps are missing - it shows the full list. We could show that on the main client machine, but we thought it might cause a lot of unnecessary output in the log (because often it would include all the bitmap anyways, if there are issues).

Finally, for V-Ray 3.0, we implemented an option for render servers to request bitmaps directly from the client machine and cache then locally, if they can't find them. This is already implemented in the nightly builds of V-Ray for Maya and seems to work quite well. That's probably the most we can do for you.

Best regards,
Vlado

[trixian]

This isn't too far off what someone else suggested regarding click-able warning messages in the log window (they were talking about over bright material warnings I think).

Making the log window more like a xml type "interactive" report and not just a text string dump like it is now would probably help a lot.

From a non-programmers perspective, having to look up something in an external file, that you became aware of through the initial log seems cumbersome.
I guess quite a few of us would like to see the log window actually identify problems in a more clear and direct way (no obscure error codes...I.E: If it can't find the license, it states just that in those words), and maybe also point you to these offenders it finds at the same time.
Now, if anything I just said is practical and doable is another question.

[rmaytee]

I don't know that I meant to blame v-ray for not finding the maps, but that the option to check for missing maps was checked, but it would render anyway. The fact that it was missing from the slave, and not my machine makes sense.... sorta. However, I agree with Christian's remarks too. I'm an artist more than a programmer, and having to look up all these stored files to get this info is a bit cumbersome.

[rmaytee]

By the way, Where can I find said v-ray log?

[vlado]

By the way, Where can I find said v-ray log?

It is usually in the TEMP folder for the current user - if you open a Windows Explorer, and type %temp% you should see a file called vraylog.txt. However if it renders even with "Check for missing files" enabled, it is unlikely that it will contain anything useful - the maps are not reported to V-Ray as missing anyways.

Best regards,
Vlado

[FSGFX]

if you use an UNC path for those textures vray should be able to find them...

[rmaytee]

The issue comes up every once in a while. I will have to eventually have to convert my workflow to UNC path or save all textures locally. Problem with saving them all locally is I am constantly making new textures for different projects. I just need to read more into UNC paths to understand all that.

Thanks for the help.

[Morne]

The issue comes up every once in a while. I will have to eventually have to convert my workflow to UNC path or save all textures locally. Problem with saving them all locally is I am constantly making new textures for different projects. I just need to read more into UNC paths to understand all that.

Thanks for the help.

in asset tracking just tick the option to automatically convert all your paths to unc. Then you can work as normal even using your mapped drives. All your paths will automatically be converted to UNC from that point on. For the paths already in the scene, just repath it to your mapped drives and then they will also be converted to UNC

[Zdravko]

When using mapped drive, do you start the spawner manually or it is registered as a service?