Using standalone Arnold in a mixed environment

Deadline
1

Hello

We’re having a few issues rendering with Arnold’s standalone renderer in a mixed platform environment. Part of the problem, I think, is that texture and shader paths are baked into the .ass files – but these are platform specific. So creating a series of .ass files in C4D on the Mac renders fine via Deadline on Macs, but not on our PC render farm.

We can force the correct texture/shader locations using command line arguments when submitting via Deadline – but is there a better / more elegant way to do this?

Many thanks

Tom

2

As we don’t have anything about cross platform rendering using Arnold, I am going to have to ask one of our devs to take a look at what we might need to do for this.

3

Hello

So while we don’t have documentation on cross platform rendering with Arnold Standalone, there is a path mapping option in the plugin config, and you can set up path mapping as per docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … path-setup to change your paths for renders. If they don’t work, we’d love to see job reports, a screenshot of the map settings, and the scene file so we can look at any paths that don’t change.

4

Hi Dwight

Thanks for this. Just to confirm that path mapping is set up correctly: all our other cross platform apps are working fine.

We’ve since run into a related issue: Maya on OS X fails to render when textures are imported via the Arnold image reader, whereas using Maya’s FileIn works fine. Maya on Windows is fine in both cases.

We can override the texture locations with the command line flag below; I just wondered whether there was a way for the submission plugin to do it for us?

kick -set options.texture_searchpath

Thanks so much

Tom

5

Hello Tom,

I just wanted to verify that this is the flag we would run in full, nothing that is per job or per machine? I’m just trying to get a handle on how we could do this.

6

Hi Dwight

I’ve pasted in a sample log below. This is from a job that’s rendering out of Maya on an OS X machine, and rendering on a Windows render farm. It’s using Arnold’s image importer, aiImage, rather than Maya’s FileIn. Using Maya’s FileIn works fine, and rendering from Windows works fine using both importers.

As you can see from the logs, the file paths haven’t been swapped out. Is it possible that Deadline don’t recognise aiImage?

Thanks!

Tom

7

Hello,

Looking at that log it seems like the paths in that scene may not be set to be relative as per our cross platform maya documentation at docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … iderations which clearly states that we can’t path map in a .mb file, so either the assets need to be relative to the path(with submit job with scene off) or you need ot save as a .ma file.