V-Ray Stdandalone, Auxiliary files not in same location as .vrscene files

Deadline
1

Hello,
my goal is to submit a V-Ray Standalone job with auxiliary files,
so the necessary assets for the scene will be copied to the local job folder prior to rendering.

Now the problem is that, if I submit the job with aux files, deadline will put the .vrscene file apart from the assets. it will create a “thread_temp” folder with random letters and numbers and put the .vrscene file in there. Now, when V-Ray renders that .vrscene file, the file will not “See” the auxiliary files and will report them as missing since “Strip paths” was on on export. “Strip Paths” means, the .vrscene file contains just file names of assets with no paths, so V-Ray expects the assets to be in the SAME directory as the .vrscene file.
If they are not there, V-Raywill error.

Now deadline puts those files (on the slave) apart from the aux files, I guess the reason is to handle concurrent tasks better, but this way V-Ray will not be able to find the files. Check it out:

20181007vztXsC60.png950×985 399 KB

Do you have any Idea how I can go ahead with this?

thank you!
-Robert

2

You’d want to disable any kind of path mapping whatsoever.

The code block in “[repo]/plugins/Vray/Vray.py” that handles this starts with:

if self.GetBooleanConfigEntryWithDefault( "EnableVrscenePathMapping", True ) or slaveInfo.IsAWSPortalInstance:

That’ll be controlled from the “Configure Plugins” dialog under the “Tools” menu.

3

Hello Edwin,
thanks for your reply.

Unfortunately I have a farm with Mixed OS slaves and, even though paths are stripped for input files, I actually do need path mapping in order to remap output paths for rendering under Linux.
Is there any other way to handle this?

Thanks so far
-Robert

4

Then… can you change your asset paths to have relative outputs? Something like this:

project_dir
    scene
        my_file.vrscene
    asset1.exr
    asset2.exr

Then you could submit them like so:

deadlinecommand c:\path\jobinfo.txt c:\path\plugininfo.txt c:\path\scene\my_file.vrscene c:\path\scene\asset*

I think that might work in this case. Even though it’s fairly kludgey, it should save a lot of custom scripting and will be multi-slave and multi-concurrent-task safe.

1 Like
5

Hello thank you for the reply!

Let me check if I understand correctly what you mean here, you mean instead of “stripping” the paths from the .vrscene file, I could replace all paths with a relative path to “one directory above” ?

While in theory that wold solve the problem and would be a sleek solution, V-ray does not support relative paths like this and only supports the “strip” option on export.

I’ve written a more detailed description of my overall Problem that I’m trying to find a solution to here:
The Other Thread

Thank you very much
-Robert

1 Like
6

Hmm. Fair enough. It’s becoming more and more obvious that you’ll likely have to change the plugin to support this workflow.

The good news is that V-Ray these days has a path re-mapping argument and you have the full path for that temporary directory in the plugin itself. This is definitely doable, it’ll just take a little work.