DR missing texture maps

I have had this setup in the past without issues, recently reformatted my main machine as well as the slaves.

I used UNC paths for my materials, in asset tracker it shows them all as “\\Maincomputer\_maps_\concrete\file.etc”

If I go to the slave machines and use explorer I can open them without trouble, and the explorer path says “\\Maincomputer\_maps_\etc” without trouble.

And idea what else I can check?

Are you running the V-Ray spawner on the render slaves as a service, or manually?

Best regards,
Vlado

Both, started with using service, then launched the spawner manually after it wasn’t working.

strangely though, I can open the scene on the slave and it renders correctly with the texture files? So it can definitely find them based on the unc path, and max doesn’t have trouble opening them, it’s only as a DR that there is a problem… Strange.

you need to configure the spawner service to start with user rights, instead of “SYSTEM”.

Yep, what Marc said; make sure the service has sufficient rights to access the network location(s).

Best regards,
Vlado

Turning off UAC entirely in windows solves this problem too from my experience. And that is without even using UNC paths. ALthough i have also had problems sending renders in rapid succession.

I did both disable uac and setup the service to run as my admin user. Working perfectly now. Thanks!!

The running the service as a user is not in the documentation anywhere. I’d recommend adding that in if it’s a requirement to get the vray spawner service working properly. Took a good 5-10 mins of googling to find the answer on a forum at vraymaterials.de

Wow, this was driving me crazy. Thanks for the help guys.

I’m finding the whole permissions thing on Win7 a real pain! How do you configure the spawner service with user rights instead of “SYSTEM” please? The DR slave will not pick up the texture maps and it’s driving me nuts!

I am having the same issues here does anyone know how to setup user rights on Ubuntu?

This is really basic, but how do you start vrayspawner as a service?
I’m trying to use distributed rendering and getting frustrated that the render slaves aren’t finding the texture maps, even though they’re all UNC pathed and loaded on the network. I’m not an IT guy, so I struggle to understand basics like how to get the vrayspawner set up as a service, rather than just manually starting it.

It would be great if the Vray user manual explained how to use all aspects of the program. For instance the user guide (Chaos: Industry-leading design and visualization software) doesn’t seem to even reference the vrayspawner (and since the manual doesn’t have a search field I can’t just do a quick search).

I couldn’t get DR on the slaves to consistently pick up the maps when running the Spawner as a Service, but by creating a shortcut to the Spawner in the Start Up folder, everything works fine.