distributed rendering

[prateekvishwa]

hi,
i searched a lot on net & still facing this issue.........

I have two computers. All my resources are on "Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Home 2TB" i am connected to this storage via router. Now when i am opening my file on any of two computers it is picking up all textures & perfectly rendering on single PC ( i tested both one by one) but on DR other computer not taking those textures... what am i doing wrong?

[prateekvishwa]

NO success....... still trying

[samuel_bubat]

presuming your slave machine has the drives correctly mapped...
the first thing you should look at is the user account control.
It should be turned of on the slave machine

[prateekvishwa]

My one machine is xp and other is windows7, since my file is not showing any missing texture on opening from goflex on both machines I am assuming files r taking texture without any issue. In fact I tested this by rendering same file individually. Only when I enable DR other machine not rendering with textures.

[samuel_bubat]

Did you turn off user account control on the slave ?

[prateekvishwa]

yes i did that... no success. I made a test scene & applied textures from goflex directly.. rendering perfectly. So it seems i may be able to use it in future but for ongoing projects where maps r applied from old path are some how not working.. I did all i.e. stripping all old paths & giving new path etc etc but this is just not working... I am giving up now

[Zdravko]

Could you please attach a vraylog.txt file from the node after rendering?
Also do you start the spawner manually or it is registered as a service? Do you use a UNC path or mapped drive?
In the Render setup>Settings enable Check for missing files option. Do you get any errors with this option?

[prateekvishwa]

Till morning, DR was rendering ok except that other computer(slave) was rendering with no materials. I changed path to UNC ( see attached jpeg) I also enabled Check for missing files option. Now i am getting error as in "v-ray message" screen ( see attached) & only main main machine rendering entire image. I am manually starting the spawner.

[prateekvishwa]

Step by step-

- To centralized resources i brought Nas drive ( Seagate goflex). I transferred all data to Nas drive.
- I made archive of one of my current project to collect all textures. after collecting all textures in one folder i put this folder on Nas drive
- I opened max file & stripped all paths & have set new path of the folder on Nas drive.
- Disconnected old drive from where textures were picked up originally so that it doesnt pickup texture.
- No success on rendering

I dont think there is any networking issue as i am able to do DR successfully for new projects where i am assigning textured directly from NAS drive. But somehow i am just not able to render my ongoing projects with the above procedures... Dont know where i am wrong..

[Donald2B]

If you are setting your map paths with the Bitmap/Photometric editor. That may be the problem. I've had problems with that in the past and have since gone a different direction. When opening an older project, I use Colin's Script, Relink Bitmap, or Asset Tracking.

Also make sure that you don't have any extra paths to textures included in the Configure User Paths area, under the External Files tab. Any paths in there are only local to the user computer and don't work on the rendernodes. So your computer may not give you an error, but if the rendernode doesn't have that exact path setup also, it will not be able to find the maps.

There is a map some where in your file that the rendernode can't find.

[alexyork]

Use Asset Tracker in your scene and make sure everything is pointing to your External Drive, and make sure the external drive has the same drive letter on all your machines (use map network drive). Quite commonly what can happen is that you import a model, such as a SKP file, and it dumps the embedded texture maps in your Project folder, which will ONLY be on your local drive and unlikely to be accessible by your render nodes - so you need to repath everything. Personally I take an assets I'm using for a job and dump them all inside the job folder (max > maps) and repath everything there in Asset Tracker, so that I know for certain that nodes are all looking at the same exact files and not dodgy local copies floating around.

[deflix]

+1 standard practice with DR is asset tracker, manually point to correct location - click refresh - convert to UNC - click refresh.