Arnold denoiser team render with PC & Mac

[stevenferalio]

Trying to use Arnold Denoiser AOV's with team render but it's failing and says it cannot find the directory where I'm saving aov's (external HD) (cannot find directory).

I can team render fine to the same location when arnold denoise aov is not enabled. 

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Stephen.Blair]

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@stevenferalio wrote:

Trying to use Arnold Denoiser AOV's with team render but it's failing and says it cannot find the directory where I'm saving aov's (external HD) (cannot find directory).

I can team render fine to the same location when arnold denoise aov is not enabled. 

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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How do PCs and Macs write to the same location? UNC paths?

> arnold denoise aov is not enabled

Just confirming: that means when the Output Arnold Denoiser AOVs check box is not enabled?

[atoffey]

I have this same problem, but with only Macs. It seems like the clients end up trying to save the denoiser AOV to their local drive, but the path doesn't match the file hierarchy of the team render host, so the render fails. Usually the files are saved in the team render cache and then sent back to the render host I think? 

[peter_horvath]

Can you show me the settings (imager, drivers, Save) and the error message? If you use Arnold Drivers, they are not going to work in single frame Team Render. But if you use the native Save option in the render settings, the denoiser AOV should be created as a layer in the output image, like any other AOVs and so should be transferred back to the server and saved properly.

[peter_horvath]

Also, are you rendering single frame or animation? Denoisers are not supported in single frame Team Render because of a technical limitation (denoisers must be executed on the full image, but in single frame team render, each client renders only a part of the image).

[atoffey]

It's an animation, not a still frame. 

Here's the error in the console from one of the clients (all clients fail similarly, the host works fine and saves the denoiser AOV correctly)

[driver_exr] /Arnold_denoiser_driver: can't create file "/AOV_DENOISE/AOV_DENOISE.0006.exr": Could not open "/AOV_DENOISE/AOV_DENOISE.0006.exr" (No such file or directory)

Attached images of Save and the drivers. I've tried all the "file path" options and get similar errors for all of them.

[peter_horvath]

Right, ok, so you output an exr for the Arnold (noice) denoiser. Unfortunately that's not going to work with Team Render as you would expect. Arnold drivers are executed by Arnold at the end of the rendering process on the client, independently from Team Render, which means the file is saved on the client and not on the server.

A workaround would be using a shared drive accessible from all clients with the same path, or setup path mapping, if the path is different on some clients.

[atoffey]

Got it, thank you for your help!

The host machine is able to create the appropriate file hierarchy locally -- is there any way that the client machines can do the same so at least the files are saved on each client's drive rather than failing?

[atoffey]

Come to think of it, it's probably a mismatch of the username, and thus user directory, so it can't be created at all.

[stevenferalio]

I figured out a workaround.

My workstation is a Mac and I had both PC/Mac render nodes. 
I ended up using parallels on Macs to run windows, installed all software and changed the IP to my local network. 

Arnold denoiser driver save file path to custom and paste in PC NAS folder structure. (Z:) 

On Mac, in regular c4d save dialogue, saved multilayer exr to in multi pass option to same NAS folder but used the Mac file structure and everything worked as expected.

Hopefully I missing something and there is a better way…

It took 3 min to denoise each frame after the render and to achieve that same level of grain free fidelity would have taken much, much longer. So definitely worth the trouble.