I’m using Deadline 10.4 with a render farm of 40 Apple Macs. PC’s submitting to this farm using Vray Spawner, rendering geo works fine, but materials that reference images do not get the correct translation.
The repository ‘Mapped paths’ has Y: Y:/ Y:\ all set to point to the Mac equivalent /Volumes/.
It must be working to some degree as the scene path is translated correctly, but Vray throws the error “Y:/network/path/to/HIMAX_PCB_Board_Normal.png” failed to load: error reading file:2: file does not exist.
Is anyone able to shine a light on what’s happening here and where I should be looking for a fix?
I’ve had a similar thing with Cinema4D.
The path mapping settings in Deadline work fine for the location of the scene file that is being rendered. In my case, it is specifically the render output path that has issues. This is hard set within the scene file, and would not get touched by the path mapping.
The fix for C4D at least, was to set any internal settings to use relative mapping vs absolute mapping. We were able to group all the textures so that they are pointed at in a folder next to the C4D scene file. This is a built in option for C4D, so it might be different for you.
Then for the render output path, we changed it to relative mapping. In C4D, by default the filepath will start in the same directory as your scene file, from there you can path and it will stay relative to where your scene file is loaded from. Again this won’t be an exact match to how VRAY runs it.
This fixed our problem so I didn’t need to go any further. If needs be, there may be something within the plugin/submission configuration files that you can add your own filepath parsing and mapping.
Thanks for the quick reply, that’s both interesting and useful.
I had wondered if the issue was that the vrscene file that was being written didn’t respect the path mapping.
Vray does have some environment variables to map paths so I’ll have a look at those, despite my dislike of Mac env settings.
If that doesn’t work I’ll have to look at tweaking the pipeline to relative paths as you suggest.