UNC Material Converter

[jujubee]

In Distributed Rendering, I noted how you have to name the materials with a UNC (Universal Naming Convention) in order to get them to render out. It would be nice if the material editor had a way to automatically rename the file paths on a local machine to a UNC. Or if there was some script that could automatically convert thess for you through the mat tree. It would save alot of time and would be one less thing to have to organize.

What are your thoughts on this?

-jujubee

[vance3d]

You can do this through the Bitmap path editor utility pretty easily right now.

V miller

[jujubee]

that's all you have to do is add the network paths to where your materials reside? And this will take care of HDRI's too?

[Syclone1]

that's all you have to do is add the network paths to where your materials reside? And this will take care of HDRI's too?

It should, as long as the HDRI's are in one of the paths in the prefs.

-dave

[jujubee]

let's just say that all your materials in the material editor are local paths, ie. c:\textures\hdri\playboymansion.hdr

and the bitmap config setup as a UNC \\compname\c\textures\hdri\

so when you go to distributed rendering, there is no need now to convert the local paths of the materials in the material editor to a UNC path? The renderer will automatically know to grab it from the UNC you specified in the bitmap configuration and send the map info to different computers on the network? Cause when I dr'd before converting the paths, there was never any mention/errors that the different comps weren't seeing the maps- instead I'd get these checkerboard patterned renders due to the missing maps.

[vance3d]

The bitmap path editor basically looks at all the bitmaps you are using in the scene and then lists where they are being sourced from.

Through simple copy and paste methods you can redirect these bitmaps to taken from other directories or the same directory just with its unc address. then when you look at your materials in the materials editor the paths for the textures will show updated sources.

the only problem I've run into with the bitmap path editor is that it doesn't see bitmaps (hdri's) used by the vrayhdri loader. From what I hear this will be fixed in the next build.

V miller

[jujubee]

ah... thanks for the awesome info!

p.s.- I'm just going about renaming my drive to 'z' and it's associated applications. Seems like it's a much easier route than the other methods.