vrscene farm rendering bitmap path problem

[bkirch]

I have a scene with several vrscene files referenced in using the VRayScene Manager. Those vrscene file texture assets render fine locally, but on our render farm the texture paths are producing the following errors.

V-Ray warning: Bitmap file "/serverX/project/Maya/geo/assetX/T:/project/Maya/tex/textureX.png" failed to load: file does not exist

The path types are mixed above. The path to the vrscene is unc but the texture path is absolute. T: is the drive letter we have assigned to "serverX". I noticed that the VRayScene Manager reads the vrscenes using the drive letter path. In the Attr Editor for the reference vrscene asset, the path is relative to that /geo level in our Maya project.


I would normally ask our render farm pipeline TD but he is not readily available.


Thanks for any insights,
-Brian

[Morbid Angel]

hmm there could be an issue on how the vray scene was exported. You could text edit the .vrscene and string replace the incorrect paths with correct ones as a quick fix.

[bkirch]

Thanks for the reply, Dmitry.

Doing a text edit in the vrscene to unc paths resolved the render farm issue, but now to figure out how to generate the vrscene files with unc paths in the first place. It's a hassle to text edit every time I generate a new vrscene.


I generated the vrscenes using the maya batch command line method from this doc, using both absolute paths and unc paths and it failed both times on the farm without doing the manual text edit.
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...ay+Scene+Files

[Morbid Angel]

Hmm well I can suggest two things. Try not using maya batch and just uncheck render and specify output file, that will just output the vray scene from your maya ui. Also you can use an environment variable so your path is always handled by it rather then a letter, for example in maya.env you can write followng line: texPath=P:\ (where P is your drive letter) then in your maya you can switch the P:/ with ${texPath}/texture/path/ you can then do the same for the unc portion and see if that helps. I never recommend mixing unc and drive paths better stick with one or the other.

[yolov]

You can also start the vray.exe -server instances with a -remapPath flag to specify how to remap asset paths. I think it's not in the documentation at the moment, but if you run vray.exe -help you'll see some help lines for this:

-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>