These steps will mean you can render from Cinema 4D in Deadline without the need for a ‘tex’ folder to be stored next to each Cinema 4D project file.
This is of real benefit when you are working in a Studio, across a network and are submitting many animations to Deadline from Cinema 4D. As an example, on just one project these steps eliminated the need for us to have 24 duplicated texture folders.
The key is to make sure every texture used is a relative texture, but force Cinema 4D to find it in a fixed path set in the Cinema 4D preferences.
Create a separate texture folder where ALL textures are stored. It works with network paths too and sub-folders so you can have separate folders within this for an environment or a product.
In Cinema 4D, go to Edit > Preferences > Files
…then add links under ‘texture paths’. There are 10 texture path slots but I would recommend using just one - it keeps things simple and it will automatically scan sub-folders.
I believe this will need to be done on each machine which will be used to render from Deadline (i.e. all workstations which will run Deadline Slave).
Apart from this, you just need to make absolutely sure that every image texture in your project is set as a local texture - in other words only the file name of the texture is referenced, not the full path to that texture. As long as the texture exists in the folder you set in the texture paths in Preferences, it should find it no problem.
In my test, the Cinema 4D file was stored in a separate location on the server, well away from the textures. However, by setting up the ‘hard-coded’ texture path in Cinema 4D on each PC, it found all of the textures and rendered fine, across multiple machines.
In the ‘Submit To Deadline’ dialog in Cinema 4D, I made sure NOT to tick ‘Submit Cinema 4D Scene file’ and ‘Export Project Before Submission’ but left ‘Enable Local Rendering’ ticked.
This all worked fine and has now given us these benefits:-
-considerably less room being taken up on the server.
-time saved from not having to duplicate existing texture folders.
-reduction in the amount of render issues due to missing textures.
-a simplified, faster way of sending renders from Cinema 4D to Deadline.
-an easier to understand, more efficient workflow.
Hopefully this is of some use to anyone using Cinema 4D / Deadline in a production environment, in terms of a simplified workflow. When used with the Take System in R17 we can setup many different shots in a single C4D file and not have to worry about missing textures - it has really helped our workflow 