Distributed Rendering between Windows and OS X computers?

[RockinAkin]

Hey There,

So I've got a Windows 7 and OSX Lion machine at my disposal, and I've been able to setup distributed rendering to work great between them!

Only problem though... is I cant figure out how to make texture maps accessible to the render slave (OSX).
Normally I use UNC file paths when distributed rendering between my windows machines, but the Mac doesn't seem to like that.
My windows machine is the main one where the project files and textures are located... and the render is being fired off from.

Any tips on what I can do to get DR to work with textures between the two OS's?
I'm using Maya 2013 and VRay 2.30.01

Thanks!

[everythinghasfresnel]

I'm having a similar problem with texture maps not being accessible by, or distributed to, my slave machines. The difference is that I'm on a Mac that is distributing to other Macs which do not share the same network volume path. I require the textures to be sent from the master to the slaves if they are missing.

Apparently in the nightly builds, there exists a feature called "transfer missing assets", which allows you to ignore the identical filepath requirement. Take a look here. Not much information is provided, but I'm assuming that my version (2.30.01) is not recent enough to have this option under Distributed Rendering settings. I would like to know which in version this "transfer missing assets" feature was added, and if it's possible to take advantage of it in my currently installed version.

[Morbid Angel]

You should try declaring a path variable in the environment for both mac and pc. Here is an example, the variable can be a different path between mac and pc.
Lets say your pc texture path is //server/project/textures and your mac path is //usr/server/project/textures. Note that each environment is only for specific platform, so for pc use only the pc line same for mac.

::PC path
SET texPath=//server/project/
::Mac Path
SET texPath=//usr/server/project/

Then your texture path will look like this: {texPath}/textures/image.jpg

During rendering vray will substitute {texPath} variable with the declared path.

[RockinAkin]

Dmitry, thanks for you response - that sounds like a good solution, but can you elaborate on it a little bit?

Do you mean that I set an environment variable on my machine to my textures path?

How do I enter that variable in maya's file node? I tried writing {texPath}/textures/image.jpg but it doesn't seem to like it.

[Morbid Angel]

There should be environment file located in "C:\Users\user\Documents\maya\2013-x64\Maya.env"

You can edit it there. You can then go to maya's script editor and check if the variable has been loaded by typing getenv texPath; maya should print the path as declared in your variable.
You would have to edit every maya.env file on every render machine to reflect your path. Or alternatively, like we do, load maya with a command file which declares all the variables (its better but more complicated to explain)

For your filenode, first you load your texture as you normally would, but then you can edit the actual text as it appears in the file node in maya's attr editor, in there that's how you replace the path line with the {texPath} variable.

[RockinAkin]

That's great - So I've declared the path variables, and they are working fine.

However, when I edit the Image Name text as it appears in the file node in maya's attr editor, and replace the path with my variable and hit enter - maya automatically changes it back to a local file path... is it supposed to do that?

[Morbid Angel]

yeah I think we dealt with that too. What you do is just change the path to {texPath}, even though maya will change it back, if you save your scene, close/open it will display the {texPath} next time. Try it, that should work.

[Morbid Angel]

You can also save your scene as .ma and edit all the paths there to replace them with the variable, should be quicker and easier...

[RockinAkin]

I figured out how to correctly setup the environment paths and file node. You have to put a '$' before the bracketed environment path, like: ${LibraryPath}
So I set them up on both machines, and when I open the file on either machine, it's able to use the environment paths to correctly find the texture file!

Unfortunately, it still doesn't seem to cooperate with VRay's Distributed Rendering. I double checked the file and environment path setup on both machines, and they work correctly. However when I try to use DR, the slave machine gives me this error:

warning: Bitmap file "/Textures/Wood/Aged.jpg" failed to load: [LoadImageFile] Failed to open file: no such file.

The file node's image file value is: ${LibraryPath}/Textures/Wood/Aged.jpg
VRay's DR seems to strip out the environment path variable.

Any idea's what I'm doing wrong / what I can do?

[Morbid Angel]

its probably because when you launch spawner, it does not initialize actual maya so you need to declare this variable in the cmd file try something like this:

SET texPath=C:/temp

cmd.exe /c start "VRaySpawner" /belownormal "%VRAY_ROOT%/bin/vraymayaspawner2012.exe" %*

Your %VRAY_ROOT can be a direct path to where the spawner is.

Also Im not sure what the command line would be under mac os...

[Zdravko]

You can also use VRAY_ASSETS_PATH environment variable to tell V-Ray for Maya and V-Ray Standalone where to look for textures. This approach requires manually running the render slave from terminal. Just before to start it on each node you need to add the following command:

export VRAY_ASSETS_PATH=path/to/textures

Then start the render slave with :

/Applications/Autodesk/maya....../Maya.app/Contents/vray/bin/vrayslave

VRAY_ASSETS_PATH is pointing to the local path and if there are unresolved paths in the scene appeared during rendering, this variable points V-Ray render to the locally saved textures.

[RockinAkin]

Thanks very much for your responses guys - It's working great now!

[Morbid Angel]

Im just curious does mac support mapped drives? That could be an easy solution...if it did.

[vlado]

Im just curious does mac support mapped drives? That could be an easy solution...if it did.

It's FreeBSD, you can certainly mount network resources to the local file system.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morbid Angel]

so you could point to say z:\temp\project\textures on a pc, and then do the same on the mac?..no need for fancy environment declarations...