Distributed Rendering Mac and PC with Texture Paths

[JabbaTheNut]

In the VRay for Maya documentation, under the section Tutorials >> Using Distributed Rendering in Vray for Maya, you find the following commentary:

Part 3: Running Slaves on Different OSes:

Cross-platform render jobs are possible with V-Ray. For example, you can start a rendering from a Windows machine, and distribute to any combination of render servers running on Linux, Mac OS X and/or Windows to join the rendering job, as long as they are running their respective render slave application. Any OS can originate a render as the render client, or receive a render job as a render slave.

Part 4: Rendering with DR:

V-Ray does not need any additional files or directory sharing set up to perform DR. However, if your Maya project is using additional bitmaps or assets, you may wish to locate everything on a shared location on your network. If not, you need to use the Transfer missing assets option, so that all the render slaves will have copies of the project assets transferred to them, before rendering can begin. For efficiency, enable Use cached assets to avoid re-transferring an already copied asset for the next rendering (more details on those options below).

I have a Mac and PC. I will be initiating and the distributed rendering from the Mac using the PC as an additional render slave. I also will be using a shared location on the network with additional bitmaps or assets. The text above indicates this is possible. However, it does not address the file path differences between Mac and PC. When I try to do a distributed rendering with additional bitmaps or assets, it fails because the file path is unrecognized by the cross platform computers.

How do you handle the path differences with a shared network location? For clarification, I understand that I can use Transfer Missing Assets with asset caching instead of a shared network location. However, I would prefer to use a shared network location as the text above suggests. Please advise.

[ivan.slavchev]

Hi,

You can try setting "VRAY_CMD_SUFFIX" variable - https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...ment+Variables
Since DR on the slave machine is practically a standalone, listening for DR jobs you can specify the paths using one of the options below for the slave (this is from V-Ray Standalone help)

-remapPath="fromPath=toPath{;fromPath=toPath}" - specify path remapping pair.
         More than one -remapPath options can be specified.

    -remapPathFile="remapFile.xml" - specify path to an XML file with
         path remapping data.
         Example file:

         <RemapPaths>
             <RemapItem>
                 <From>Z:/export</From>
                 <To>/mnt/export</To>
             </RemapItem>
         </RemapPaths>