We’ve been trying to get some Macs in our studio running on the farm. But Deadline keeps throwing errors when it attempts to run on these machines. It looks like it is unable to find the modo_cl executable. But we copied the path to it on the Macs so it should be correct. I have mapped paths set as well, but I’m wondering if I have to have a few more paths set for it to find the executables? Right now the paths are mapped so slaves can find the network drives.
James
modo_mac.txt (3.89 KB)
Hello James,
Path mapping isn’t applied to the executable paths in a job, only the scenes and, in some cases, the assets. What you would want for that is to go into config plugins and add the path to executable under the proper plugin. Hope that helps.
I do have that set.
/Applications/modo 801_sp1.app/Contents/MacOS
Hello James,
Taking a look at our path in our farm, the location Deadline is looking for looks like “/Applications/modo.app/Contents/MacOS/modo_cl” so I suspect the path on yours should be “/Applications/modo 801_sp1.app/Contents/MacOS/modo_cl”
Ah OK. let me give that a try. I was suspecting that this plugin path was the issue.
I also didn’t even notice that the modo_cl was missing from the path.
So Deadline can now see the modo_cl on our Mac. But it is still failing almost right away. I think the issue is that Modo can’t locate the images files within the scene because they are saved as a Windows file path. The mapped paths aren’t working because this is an internal Modo command…at least that’s what I’m assuming. So the question is, are there any workarounds for this?
James
PS new error log attached.
modo_mac.txt (6.34 KB)
Hello James,
So looking at the log you sent, we are sending the command to Modo, it’s getting the command, and then we see the following:
! (messageDialogs) [Yes/No/No To All] - File Not Found | O:Assets/Modo_Presets_Library/801 Contents/Assets/Images/Organic/Water/water_bump.png not found; select alternate file?
Basically it looks like Modo is unable to find a file, and pops up a dialog to select an alternate, but we have no handlers for that. Is an asset missing likely to cause major issues with the output? If not we could code in a popup handler for you. Let us know.
Cheers,
Well, normally what happens when working in a purely PC environment is that if there is a missing asset we will get exactly the same error. This happens a lot when an artist uses an image file from their local machine. But the difference here is that because modo_cl is being run from a Mac, it has no idea what that file path means and so it’s complaining about not being able to locate the file…even though it is on one of our network drives.
So I’m assuming that there needs to be a way to change the file path in Modo. But from what I know of Modo, that’s pretty much impossible. There is no way to change a scene file outside of the Modo app since the scene files are binary rather than ascii. Am I wrong on this?
Hello James,
So our modo cross platform documentation shows that you are right, we can’t do path mapping on the assets in the modo scene file, and it does show (thinkboxsoftware.com/deadlin … iderations) that we advise all assets in the scene file should be mapped to the assets in the same network folder as the scene file. Hopefully following those steps your issues should clear up.
Cheers,
Actually, it’s impossible to clear this issue up due to the fact that Deadline can’t swap out the paths for assets inside of the Modo scene file. It looks like the mapped paths setting is only used in locating the scene file and for making sure the rendered images go to the right place. It’s a shame but it’s really on Luxology for not taking into account cross platform possibilities. But, this was only a test. We have some old user Macs that aren’t being used and we thought we might add them to the farm. Oh well.
Thanks for looking into this.
James
Hi James,
I have reached out to The Foundry regarding this matter for the future…
Mike
Thanks Mike. I was considering bringing this up in the beta forums as well. I’d love for them to open up their scene files to some out of modo manipulation.
The Foundry have now responded and I have asked them for some additional information on what might be possible.
WIP… 
More excellent progress has been made this afternoon…WIP…nothing to see here yet…
What is the status on this? I am looking into using Azure for rendering. But since Azure is running on Windows and we are running on Macs, paths become an issue. What is the current recommended way to go about this? Is it possible at all to submit something from a Mac and have it render on Azure via Deadline?
Right now my tests still are by running everything manually. Upload, logging into the Azure VMs via Remote Desktop and submitting the shots by hand.
I’d like to get away from that as fast as possible. Especially since I have Deadline for our local farm and setting things up by hand is very 90’s. 
Hi,
I would check out upcoming Deadline v7.0 and our VMX technology for VM / cloud rendering automatic orchestration and balancing:
thinkboxsoftware.com/news/20 … osted.html
We have a wish list item on the roadmap to provide Modo cross-platform asset / path re-mapping, but it won’t make the v7.0 boat before it sails. However, we should get to this over the next few months, so it is coming
For the time being, have you considered using Linux VM’s as Modo works on Linux, saving on OS cost, Azure now supports Linux VM’s and then possibly, path mappings would be easier to work with across the different OS as a central file server could be configured to allow a file share that presents itself, that works for both OSX and Linux?
Hi Mike,
I have thought about it and Linux is definitely something I am looking into. I am just not that experienced with it so troubleshooting could turn into a nightmare very quickly. Especially if something breaks in production. Windows feels safer as I have much more experience with it.
