Day one of Deadline and Houdini hookup - I’m crashing around in the dark, but making good progress 
I’ve added a Deadline submission node after the Redshift ROP and hit “Submit to Deadline” in the node params. All good except I have a client worker running which is not picking up one of the project assets. Looks like the HDRI map is missing. The host machine running the repository returns frames as expected, but the slave/worker is incorrect. I guess I’m not understanding the paths setup or have not installed the rep-server correctly?
whats the path for the hdri? there are some known issues using $HIP (or maybe $JOB I can’t remember which one doesn’t work all the time) else if it’s local then that’s the issue.
1 Like
In general terms, the Deadline Workers expect to have access to shared assets over the network. So if a Worker on the machine that submitted the Job can render it properly, but another machine on the network does not render properly, chances are the latter machine does not have access to the location where the asset is stored. As Anthony suggested, this could mean that the asset is local to the first machine.
Deadline does not have a general asset transfer mechanism - some 3D application integrations might have special case handling, but it is expected that you would handle the setup of the network resources to ensure that every Deadline Worker can read and write assets in a shared network location (NAS drive, file server, shared drive, whatever).
Deadline does have a feature to remap paths between operating systems (Windows, Linux, macOS), and a Windows-centric feature to map network shares to drive letters. But these features do not do anything to move assets around - the Workers expect the asset paths to be accessible.
Most submitters / integration plugins also allow the scene file itself to be send with the job as an auxiliary file. This copies the source file to be rendered into the Repository, and then that file gets copied to the local temp. folder of every render node. So it is possible to have a local scene file that gets moved around the network by Deadline itself. However, at least in the case of Houdini, this mechanism does not apply to external dependencies (caches, textures, etc.).
I hope that these general guidelines will help you figure out how to configure your asset storage to benefit your Deadline deployment. If you have specific questions or anything is unclear, please ask!
1 Like
Ok, yes the asset is local to the host machine. The HDRI is on an internal drive E:/ and the $HIP is on D:/ the repository is on C:/ I will check that my worker machines have access and mapped drives to those host paths. Interestingly the slave node wrote its rendered frames to local D:/Frames and not to network>Host>D:/Frames. Looks like I need to do a bit of network admin housekeeping to set things straight. First up, I’ll get all the assets together on the local machine in one place a see if the network picks that up ok. Thanks for your help - Anthony too.
1 Like