DR nodes not rendering maps

[Brian Cassil]

For some reason our DR nodes are not rendering any of the maps, the geometry comes out as flat gray. The buckets rendered on the host machine render fine. I've tried sending the scene to one of the nodes via backburner and that renders fine as well, but the same machine used in DR does not. All the maps are on a network drive that is accessable by the DR node. I've tried pinging the DR node and that works fine too. I'm using Max 2011 64 bit and VRay version is 2.10.01 and Windows 7 professional

 

Thanks for any help.

[Matt McDonald]

My V-ray terminology is a little shaky but I believe that the DR component of V-Ray is called the Spawner service. The spawner service has to have admin rights to your network locations. So, by defalt it just runs as "system" and your network won't allow anyone with the name "system" to access file servers. You'll need to go into the properties of the spawner service and enter a proper username + password. So... brian.cassil@firmname.com and whatever your password is. Better yet, get your system admin to create a user account strictly for this purpose. Render.Admin@firmname.com

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Hmmm..... ours do not have admin rights, but render fine 90% of the time. The other times I use the old IT standby, and restart the machine, and that usually fixes the problem.

[Brian Cassil]

Hmmm..... ours do not have admin rights, but render fine 90% of the time. The other times I use the old IT standby, and restart the machine, and that usually fixes the problem.

Yeah... I tried rebooting because that's about the extent of my IT skills. I'll give the suggestions from elevation to the IT pros here and see what they can do.

[erickdt]

For some reason I've found that since switching to Windows 7 I've had to resolve external paths to UNC paths and then make them relative to the project folder in asset tracking to make them work for distributed rendering. This is a relatively new phenomena as I never had to do this before. Now as a matter of course I always check my asset tracking before I send off a job to the network.

 

I usually use backburner and I realize you're talking about DR but the same still might apply.

 

E

[Brian Cassil]

For some reason I've found that since switching to Windows 7 I've had to resolve external paths to UNC paths and then make them relative to the project folder in asset tracking to make them work for distributed rendering...

 

That did it! Thanks for the tip but I have to say I hate that this is something that I will have to hassle with on everytime I go to render. On large scenes the asset tracker is extremely slow. Here's hoping Autodesk/Chaos/Microsoft will all gather around a table and figure this out... They'll get right on that I'm sure.

 

Is there a way to set up project settings so I don't have to go through this?

[Matt McDonald]

Under "preferences" - "files" you have the option to "Convert file paths to UNC" and to "Convert local file paths to Relative" I have the former checked and the latter unchecked but I haven't encounter exactly the same problem as you.

[Brian Cassil]

Interesting. I have the same settings. I'm going to try checking the "convert local file paths to relative", create a simple test scene and see how that works. I will return and report.

[avvid]

I always use absolute paths, regardless of whether I'm mapping drives on the clients or not, and I've never had a problem, except that occasionally, things like IES files don't get converted to absolute paths automatically, which crashes the V-Ray nodes, when they can't find the file. All I do is go into Asset Tracking, find any non-UNC paths, right-click, and select "Make Path Absolute" (you can do this to multiple files at once).

 

If anyone is having texture problems of this sort, I'd recommend going to one of the clients, clicking on "Start" > "Run...", then typing the exact path to the texture, as you see it in Asset Tracking on the host, then clicking "OK". If it doesn't open, then you know there's a problem with the path. If it opens okay, then your problems aren't to do with access to the files.