EXR's no longer rendering

Deadline
1

Just yesterday (and the past month) we were rendering mentalRay EXR’s on our farm with no problem. Today, no matter what scenes I submit, all EXR renders take full render times, complete, but only write out correctly named 1KB files. Anyone have any thoughts?

2

So little update:
On our Isilon file server, all the permissions are the same across the board. However, rendering the EXRs to any of our project directories produces the 1kb file black frame result. If I render to one of the users directories, they work.

Structure is basically:

FS–
–Jobs
----Job One
--------Spot
-----------Shot1
--------------Renders
-----------Shot2
--------------Renders
----Job Two
–Users
----User One
----User Two

So outputting to one of those render folders, no go, to a user folder, fine. I double and triple checked permissions across the board and they are all the same. I’m baffled…

3

That’s a strange one, but the fact that it works when you point the output to a different folder would definitely seem to indicate there is some sort of permissions/server issue. Out of curiosity, does the same problem happen when you render locally (ie: not using Deadline)?

Cheers,

  • Ryan
4

Rendering locally presents no issues either. Everything points to permissions but I’ve triple-checked that they are the same across the board. Especially since the user folders have the same permissions, on the same file server, and they work makes this even more odd.

5

I noticed that the Render folders are deeper in the folder structure than the User folders. Are the full paths to these Render folders pretty long (ie: longer than 256 characters)? Or maybe the problem is in the path names themselves (ie: an invalid path character). Just tossing out some ideas off the top of my head, since we’ve never seen or heard of this particular problem before… :slight_smile:

6

Just throwing my thoughts in as well…

  1. Is it possible that the actual “renders” directory has become corrupt? Can you delete and re-create this directory? or at least carry out a test to this extent and thereby reset permissions?
  2. Has one of your artists/TD’s added a special metadata channel to the EXR’s you are rendering out, which is reliant on being saved to a certain folder, which throws an exception when being saved to the “renders” folder? As Ryan said, an illegal character in a channel in the EXR? Maybe try eliminating some EXR channels to get to the bottom of the file format…?
  3. Have you tried rendering/saving out a different file format to eliminate EXR as being the problem?
  4. Finally, can you get your IT specialists to check the FS on the Isilion and ensure it is ok?

Mike

7

Just an update (still can’t figure this one out though haven’t been full-tilt debugging it), this only occurs with mentalRay. Renderman has no problem with the EXRs.

8

Don’t ask me why… but it was UNC paths. In the past, I have not had an issue with mixing both UNC and mapped drive paths. All workstations and render nodes will happily browse through both. Today I narrowed it down that the machines specific exr issue was writing to the file server. Normally, we browse there through \shade.vfx.com\isilon or a mapped drive (Z:). I switched everything to only browse through the mapped drive (all output paths, project locations, etc) in the submitter files and the save locations of all the assets and it started working again. Was never an issue in the past, but either Maya '09 or a combination of things doesn’t like the UNC paths. Either way, works now, onward with the mapped drives.