Hi, Ive just set up deadline 5 on two machines with maya 2012 64bit. Ive sent a scene to be rendered as a normal submit maya render job but Mental Ray used in my render globals. The scene renders fine on my main pc (the one the maya file is on) … but on my second machine , a laptop I have set up I get the below error message saying it cant load the scene ? … Ive also made the project folder a shared folder and this can been accessed fine on the laptop. 
Exception Details
RenderPluginException – Exception during render: An error occurred in RenderTasks(): Deadline caught error “mel: Error: Cannot load scene. Please check the scene name.”. If this error message is unavoidable but not fatal to your render, please email support@thinkboxsoftware.com with the error message, and disable the Maya job setting Strict Error Checking.
at Deadline.Plugins.ScriptPlugin.RenderTasks(Int32 startFrame, Int32 endFrame, String& outMessage)
RenderPluginException.Cause: JobError (2)
RenderPluginException.HasSlaveLog: True
Exception.Data: ( )
Exception.TargetSite: Void RenderTask(Int32, Int32)
Exception.Source: deadline
Exception.StackTrace:
at Deadline.Plugins.Plugin.RenderTask(Int32 startFrame, Int32 endFrame)
at Deadline.Slaves.SlaveRenderThread.RenderCurrentTask(TaskLogWriter tlw)
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
---- May 23 2011 – 10:18 PM ----
Info Thread - Using process affinity of 4 CPUs
Any ideas why this is happening ?
Many thanks
Hi, Ive managed to get this working. I realised a message on submitting the job saying that the “file was on a local machine so not all slaves would be used”, even though I had made sure the project was a shared folder and accessed on my laptop on the network. What I did was when submitting the job make the project path \DAVESHP\3D work folder… etc instead of D:\3D work folder… and same for the output path.
But I still got the message and couldnt set the project path inside maya to my server \DAVESHP…etc So I actually navigated to the maya file through my network in wondows explorer \DAVESHP etc instead of D:\3D work…etc and double clicked opened it from there and all rendered on both machines fine ! 
Why is it that I have to do this though? as I thought setting the project as a shared folder and when submitting the job to deadline with teh project path and output paths to my server \DAVESHP\3D work … should be enough ?
Thanks
The clients also need to be able to access the Maya scene file. By default, this file is not submitted with the job, and that’s why you needed to open the Maya file from the UNC path for the other machine to find it. Now there are two things you can do if you want to continue to use the D: path:
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Configure Path Mappings (thinkboxsoftware.com/deadlin … Path_Setup) so that "D:" is mapped to "\DAVESHP". Normally, Path Mappings are used for cross platform rendering, but in this case, it works great at converting drive letters to their corresponding UNC path.
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Enable the option to submit the Maya scene file with the job. Note though that this stores the scene file on your repository, which can impact performance if it’s a large file.
Hope this helps!