Our render machine has the license server verison of Cinema 4D installed. Octane is also installed as a plugin and stand alone on the Render machine.
If I’m on my work machine in C4D and I “Submit to Deadline”, everything works fine - but the RENDER machine does not load or read ANY textures, and spits out 3D objects with no textures applied.
The only difference between my work machine and the render machine, is that the render machine has that .INI file inside of it which causes CInema to boot up in some kind of ‘License Server’ mode, like it should.
I dont’ know if it’s related, but if I attempt to boot up Cinema 4D on the Renderbot, I get a message that says "Missing Serial Number for ‘Cinema 4D’! - but our IT person said this is okay that this is happening because everything is handled through deadline. I don’t know if this is the problem, and nobody wants to chase a red herring.
This is a very confusing issue that nobody has any answers to (even Thinkbox support) So any help would be appreciated.
Huh. I couldn’t find a ticket in the system from the address you have registered here in the forums.
Deadline itself isn’t involved in setting up licensing. What it will do is open the command line version of Cinema 4D and control it either via command line flags or its internal Python API.
Texture issues are often a case where the scene file was submitted through Deadline and the textures cannot be found. This is either because they’re relative to the scene file which is no longer in the same place it was on your workstation (try turning off ‘submit scene file’ as a test) or that the workstation is running a different OS than the render nodes (Windows versus Linux versus macOS).
Setting up path mapping should help if the OSes are different.
If both machines are the same OS and not submitting the scene doesn’t change anything, try following this troubleshooting guide.
I used my personal Amazon account (I couldn’t register any other way)
I found something that worked - at least for some things. It was in the ‘considerations’ section of your documentation. Basically you MUST check (export scene before submitting) which basically has you re-save the scene file somewhere.
Now, while that works for some things - it’s not working for ALL things. For example, secondary things like bump maps and opacity maps are acting strange.
I am going to see what happens when I uncheck submit scene file and I’ll report back. Nope this didn’t help.
I would initially try submitting the job with batch enabled, export disabled and submit scene disabled. Does the job error here? What are the errors? I would then try the troubleshooting guide that Edwin suggested which isolates the C4D render from Deadline. Doing this can help track down the root cause.
So, it sounds the problem is at least assets here since the ‘tex’ folder export seems to have made some kind of difference.
To elaborate Charles’ recommendation: Because the ‘export scene before submitting’ mode is moving most of the assets to be relative to the scene file, choosing to submit the scene won’t go very well as the scene won’t be anywhere near the ‘tex’ folder.
To add more questions: Are your render machines the same operating system as your workstation? Also are you using mapped drives on Windows? The reason I ask is that it’s possible that one or two paths aren’t being adjusted (say if your bump maps live on a different drive).
Hey guys, I was able to find some solutions to my other issues.
Octane’s fault wag finger. If someone changes their ENV background color, the global illumination casts a shade on your entire scene in relation to that color. So if one person changes it to black, and another person leaves it on the default grey, you get a flicker.
Pretty much all my issues have been solved now. Thanks for your help, I’m enjoying using deadline so far!
