I am running an animation and some of my Vray proxy objects randomly disappear. I have the proxies in a location that all the computers can see and a second location that is included in Max’s search path. I also tried launching the job through backburner using include maps. Nothing seem to consistently work. Any ideas?
Thanks,
-Shane
Copy the proxies locally to each machine; that always works.
Best regards,
Vlado
Thanks Vlado, I’ll give it a try.
Make sure all your proxy paths are UNC.
Using network paths instead of drive letter paths for your proxies also seem to help.
Yes, that is what UNC is. Drive letter paths are relative, and if not logged on, they cannot use them. UNC is the “absolute” path. This is basic windows networking…
Thanks guys I did use unc paths. Vlado’s suggestion seem to be working. Although it’s quit a pain moving the proxies to the local machines.
Is UNC as same as mapping for instance, a certain partition on one computer as a network drive?
I’m trying to render a proxy tree via backburner but it always seems to be missing on the slave machines. I’ve set up the proxy so it uses the mesh from a network drive but still no luck.
UNC is \\computername\folder instead of mapped drive letters like G:\folder.
Mapped drives bad, UNC good.
actually it is \\computername\sharename\folder 
All of our proxies are unc and it is still happaning form time to time..
it has become part of the workflow , render the animatin… checking for missing proxies…rendering the missing proxies frames again and again…
Is there a good solution for that?(don’t tell me to copy them to local machines…)
Beef up your network?
We use a lot of proxies and I don’t remember any ever being dropped…
What we have done in the past is check the bad frames out in Backburner to see what machine is causing the problem and then remap the drives on that machine, after rebooting it. Normally the issue will go away.
Cheers
Mike K
I wanted to add to this thread that I’ve also been having this problem. A scene that is almost completely proxy because of the density. From my experience certain machines on the network will fail at different times. There isn’t one machine that constantly fails. Also I’ve seen that man of these times certain proxies will load while others will fail. So all the proxies never fail completely.
possible issues:
- folder paths: all the proxies are in different folders, alongside matching max files. So there could be problems with the naming of certain locations
- quantity of proxies. The specific file I’m working with is around 30 or 50 thousand objects
- server connection issues, starts loading proxies and then trips up
not sure..
so for now I render all the way through and then go back to patch
I would bet just about anything that it all network related
I can probably make V-Ray to re-try loading the proxy, if something in fails; not sure how helpful this will be.
Best regards,
Vlado
What if vray could be setup to store the proxies once it loads successfully the first time? That would help take some pain off the network from having a dozen machines re-loading so many proxies every frame.
What is vray doing when it loads the proxies? Does it load them locally?
I think you’d be better off mirroring them locally yourself, the beauty (or bane in your case) is that info is read from the vrmesh files only as it is needed reducing memory usage, so the entire proxy is likely never present on the slave at the same time.
Hmm. It would still be nice though if all the proxies were copied/held locally until called into the memory.
yeah I should just stop talking now and start copying those proxies locally now.
*cries*
When you say copy them locally, do you then have to remap the paths again. I have this same problem but i’m using lots of different proxies in different paths. It’s a real pain to go through and change all the paths one by one.