Since we use our workstations to add extra power to the render farm we have linux, windows and mac machines at the same time.
We got this working fine with Deadline 7.2, but now, starting fresh with the Deadline 8 beta, we’re having issues with the path substitution. Our current setup can be seen in the attached screenshot.
What happens is that the nodes try to render using the original path, no matter which operating system they belong to. If we submit using a linux workstation the linux render nodes are happy, but not so much the mac and windows ones.
Error message from a windows render node (submitted from linux):
Error: Error: file: C:/Users/render/AppData/Local/Temp/tmp63C0.tmp line 41: Cannot load scene "//fileserver/Prosjekter/Test/00758_The_Spin/maya/scenes/render/Test_render_v.0040_wireframe.mb". Please check the scene path, then try opening the scene on the machine which ran this job to troubleshoot the problem.
at Deadline.Plugins.PluginWrapper.RenderTasks(String taskId, Int32 startFrame, Int32 endFrame, String& outMessage, AbortLevel& abortLevel)
We’re using Maya 2016 with V-Ray and rendering using the maya-batch plugin with path substitution using dirmap command.
Any ideas on what might be wrong here?
Looks like there is a bug where mapping paths is not working when there is no specified region (or the region for the mapped paths is set to “All”). A work around for this is to set a region for your farm and assign that region to the mapped paths. We will have a fix in the next beta. Thanks for reporting this!
Great, thanks! This solved the issue for us.
Only thing is that there’s no way, that we can find, to set the region during install of the render nodes - or change it later, without editing the deadline.ini file manually. Shouldn’t it be possible to set this using the “Modify Slave Properties” from the Monitor? We do have a dropdown box for region there, but it’s empty and nothing happens when we click on it. This same behaviour can be replicated on all three platforms.
Is there another way to configure this for multiple nodes?
There was supposed to be an option in the Client installer to specify the region via the command line (using a “–region” option). This will be fixed in the next release. After installation, it can be changed from the Launcher’s context menu (using “Change Region”). It can also be set via autoconfiguration:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … onfig.html
(Note that those are the 7.2 docs, but you can refer to the same section in the 8.0 docs, which you can download from the same location you downloaded the beta installers).
In Deadline 8.0, the Region is no longer a property of the slave, user, etc. It is now a property of the client installation on the machine, and it affects all Deadline applications that run on that machine. It’s similar to the Repository path, or License Server settings, which is why there isn’t an option to change it in the Slave Properties in the Monitor.
Cheers,
Ryan
Excellent! Thanks for clarifying 
