Rendering stand-ins on a render farm

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to render a scene containing .ass files on a renderfarm but I ran into a problem with the texture files. All stand-ins render grey. Relative paths work fine for references and everything else, I just can't get it to work with stand-ins.
How do I need to set this up to make it work?
I had a look at this post:
https://answers.arnoldrenderer.com/questions/1181/arnold-rendering-stand-ins-with-relative-path.html
Is the render farm workflow similar to this? I'm probably missing something here.

Thanks a lot, any help is highly appreciated!

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

You have to export the ASS files with relative paths. Check the ASS files: if there are absolute paths for filenames, then it won't work on the render farm.

And you have to have to right path in the Texture Search Path. The relative paths are resolved relative to the Texture Search Path.

If you're getting gray, that's because that is the default color for the MayaFile node when a texture file cannot be found.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your reply @Stephen Blair. I checked the file paths again to make they are relative but it is still not working. One thing to maybe note is that the project I am working on isn't using the default Maya project structure. There's still a main project folder with a workspace mel but besides that the way the files are organized is different. When rendering scenes containing Maya references it all works as it should though.Are stand-ins dependent on the default Maya file structure? A typical file path for texture looks like this:

M:\Artella\_art\production\4\4a5a0fc3-6c6f-447e-8684-ee39582984ba\assets\prop\st_ac_overpass\__working__\textures\overpass_rust_roughness.tx

So the texture search path would be:

M:/Artella/_art/production/4/4a5a0fc3-6c6f-447e-8684-ee39582984ba

And the texture file path inside the ASS file:

"assets/prop/st_ac_overpass/__working__/textures/overpass_rust_roughness.tx"

4a5a0fc3-6c6f-447e-8684-ee39582984ba is the project folder.

Am I doing something wrong here? Thanks a lot for your help.

[Stephen.Blair]

M:\Artella_art\
M:/Artella/_art/

[Anonymous]

Sorry for that. I copied that path from the explorer adress bar and that one slash got lost somehow.
In the .ma and ASS files the slashes are forward leaning.

[Stephen.Blair]

Hi

Back or forward doesn't matter. It's "Artella_art" versus "Artella/_art" that looks like a problem.

[Anonymous]

Yes, that were my butter fingers when I copied the path over here. Inside the files the slash is there.

Besides that I'm a bit clueless right now. Maybe it's something on the farms side.

Thanks!

[Stephen.Blair]

I assume it's the same thing with "st_ac_overpass__working__" and "st_ac_overpass/__working__" ?

If you look in the Arnold log and see something like this:

00:00:01  1038MB         |   Image file statistics:
00:00:01  1038MB         |         opens   tiles    MB read   --redundant--   I/O time  res              File
00:00:01  1038MB         |   BROKEN                                                                      textures/noicon.tx

Then you know the Texture Search Path isn't set correctly, because the relative path ("textures/noicon.tx") could not be resolved