I have a weird problem and naturally under a hot deadline. Win7, MAX2014, RPM, Deadline6.
I have a scanline scene setup that when I render a preview render from within RPM on the workstation, the preview renders fine showing all textures, etc. The textures are located on a network drive and are defined using UNC pathnames (as I do on every project).
But when I send the passes to Deadline for the farm to render, the resulting render frames have NO textures in the images. The passes are setup to render specific frames such as 27,54,78,123,175, etc. They are rendering fine… just no textures in the images. When I choose to render an entire pass locally (on the workstation), the resulting frames are fine.
I have double-checked that all the textures are UNC paths and the preview from the workstation proves they are accessible and properly defined. I have checked the scanline renderer setup in RPM and Mapping is checked (which controls the setting in the Render Setup dialog… I never uncheck it normally). The job properties show that Mapping is ‘True’. I have rebooted all systems. Yet the problem persists.
Is there any switch somewhere in Deadline which would prevent textures when net-rendering?
Thanks!
Hi Mike,
This may be local session paths being overly helpful here and resolving your texture paths for you when rendering locally but will be missing during network rendering.
If you go to 3dsmax --> customize --> configure user paths --> “External files” tab are there a number of paths which would effectively resolve where your texture paths are? If you delete them, save your max file and re-open your max file, are your scene files now missing texture maps and you get a missing textures dialog pop-up?
If so, hit cancel during opening the scene file, DO NOT use this dialog to re-wire your texture files. Instead once the scene is open, use “Asset Tracker” / bitmap/photometric editor utility to re-wire your textures and try re-submitting the file to Deadline. It should then render with textures the same as rendering locally.
Let us know if that fixes the issue for you?
Mike
Mike, thanks very much for the ideas!
I thought about that aspect too. But I never use this aspect of MAX at all. I went and checked ALL the paths under Configure User Paths and they are all the standard paths pointing to MAX subfolders, etc.
The way I always setup my pipeline is if I have a project named ‘Jones’, and all maps are located in:
G:\client\jones\maps
While I’m working on the workstation (before the need for net-rendering), the map paths point to the files in this directory. Once I’m ready to start net-rendering, I copy the entire maps folder to the main file server such as:
\PC20\D-Drive\client\jones\maps
and then I use Bitmap/Photometric Paths to point all maps to the new location. I have double-checked that all the paths are properly pointing to the main file server location.
This is the way I work on all projects and I just recently worked on a project and all worked as normal. The only thing unusual about this project is that rather than rendering animations (such as frames 1-5000), I am rendering a non-contiguous set of frames (27,56,122,143,201, etc.).
I’m baffled.
Hmmm…very strange. Perhaps it’s a DNS issue and your rendernode machine is unable to resolve to \PC20?
I guess if you are submitting the Max file with the Deadline Job, once in Deadline Monitor, you could right-click on the job, go to --> “Auxiliary Files” --> “Explore…” the Aux folder where your Max file has been submitted to and try opening this file up on the rendernode locally and see what happens when you render it locally on this machine in GUI. (start up 3dsMax in eval mode for the purposes of this test).
If the textures are still missing, then we have eliminated Deadline rendering out of the equation and just need to understand how the paths are getting messed up along the way…
In Deadline, do you have any “Mapped Paths” configured which are swapping out the mapped paths for you, which might be causing this issue?
OK, all sorted now.
In my exhaustion yesterday, I had entered the path incorrectly in the Bitmap/Photometric Paths dialog. For some reason, the workstation was able to use that path but all the render slaves were not. The path was:
PC20\D-Drive\client\jones\maps
it should have been:
\PC20\D-Drive\client\jones\maps
Thanks anyway!
Cool. I’m pleased we got to the bottom of it!
Happy rendering 