I am trying to render partitions for krakatoa on my render farm in max 2009 and the partition files are coming out at 1kb and contain no particle information. I don’t see any other reported errors. Anyone else have this before?
Let’s start with this: Does it save correctly locally?
If it produces correct files on the workstation, but does not produce files on the network, there must be something misconfigured on the network machines.
Then you will have to check what kind of particles you are saving and if you are using, say, PFlow, whether the same flow renders in Scanline on the network or not.
If it does not, then there might be a 3rd party plugin that is not licensed correctly for network rendering. If it does render particles in Scanline, then it might be a Krakatoa problem.
Any additional information about ANYTHING would be great (come on, you wrote two sentences 
)
What sort of particles are you saving, are you using any other 3rd party plugins in the scene, what sort of Krakatoa license do you have, what version of Krakatoa, what version of the network manager and so on and so on.
bobo, yes it renders correctly on the workstation. The farm is setup with max 2011 and max 2009. the 2011 jobs seem to work fine but the 2009 jobs seem to not be fine. At first I thought it had something to do with the fact that max2011 was setup as the krakatoa renderer but when I switched it back to 2009 it still seemed to not render correctly. when looking at the deadline output during rendering it seems to do everything that it should but when it comes to rendering the prt it zips through it like a hot knife through butter so at that point I knew that something was wrong but I sill did not specifically know what the cause was.
I hope that this additional information is helpful. tks.
-Christian
Hi Christian,
Where are these particles coming from? ex. Particle Flow, Thinking Particles, etc.
Thanks for the info. My gut feeling is that something is not licensed right on your 2009 slaves, and it is not Krakatoa (since it is saving, but empty files).
So once again:
*If you send the same scene to RENDER with SCANLINE using the same particle source (assuming you can make it render less particles and use geometry), does it produce images? If your particle source is generating 0 particles because of a licensing or other issue, it would prove the problem is in the particle system itself and not in Krakatoa.
*Does the problem occur with ANY particle system or just one specific scene? In other words, if you open Particle Flow, drag a standard flow, set up Krakatoa for partitioning and send it to partition on Deadline, do you still get 0 particles saved?
*Please tell us what exactly is being saved - PFlow, TP, something else? Please also list any 3rd party plugins involved in the setup, e.g. FumeFX, PFlow Tools Box #2/#3 etc. If you are not using any, say “I don’t use any”
Bobo, I checked into this some more and it looks like it only happens on 2009 jobs and yes it occurs on all of them, not just the scene I was working on. The particles render fine and a local partition job renders fine on the local machine, it is just the farm. I switched the krakatoa exe to max 2009 on one render node and it still produced 1kb frames. How do I check for krakatoa licenseing on the render node? do I just have to run the reg edit again or something? Again, 2011 jobs partition fine on the farm and are not being a problem.
Krakatoa will not create any particle files at all if its licensing is incorrect. I believe Bobo was suggesting that whatever tool you are using to generate your particles is not licensed correctly on those machines.
The best way to test this would be to convert your scene to render your particles with Default Scanline instead of saving to PRT with Krakatoa. If the renders come out blank, you know that its not Krakatoa’s fault that it didn’t find any particles.
Let me know how that goes!
I edited my post’s first line to be more accurate. Bobo kindly reminded me that Krakatoa won’t create any files at all if its licensing is incorrect. See the previous post for more details.
yeah, well it’s making files; they’re just empty and have no particles in them. Maybe I should just reinstall krakatoa, maybe that will fix it.
Sorry to sound like a broken record, but Bobo and I are trying to stress that it might not be Krakatoa that is installed incorrectly. Have you submitted a rendering job to the farm that renders these particles in Max 2009 without using Krakatoa? In other words, have you determined that the issue cannot be anything but Krakatoa?
oh yes, sorry for not totally understanding you. Yes I did this test and it worked fine. Another factor that might be of interest is that the krakatoa render itself renders fine on the farm in 2009 it is only the partitioning that seems to be broken.
Thanks, mybad for not understanding your question. The answer is yes. I tested this with the normal particle system and it rendered fine. Another thing you should know is that I have 2011 and 2009 installed on the same rendernodes. Could this be cause for conflict? Another piece of information is that it only fails on making partitions in 2009. Krakatoa itself still renders the scene fine in 2009 and 2011 (once the partitions have been made).