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

[operatoriStudioRain]

Hi, I’ve got the same problem with 3ds Max Arnold. I managed to get them working on a different PC by creating a virtual drive, recreating the same directory structure and putting all the textures in there. The problem is that the .ass files embed the local path to the textures, and once sent to the render farm, the stand-ins appear grey because the textures can’t be found. Is there anything that can be done with the Arnold procedural plugin? You can work around it by speaking to the render farm and getting them to recreate a virtual drive with the path containing the textures, as mentioned earlier... but it’s a problem; it’s a bit of a catch-22. Using stand-ins for huge scenes saves you from having gigabytes of files instead of megabytes, but then we have this problem...

When you export the standins, export them with relative paths.

If the ass files already have absolute paths and you cannot export again, then set up a pathmap file.

Help | Path Mapping | Autodesk

[juliasimpson763]

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@Anonymous wrote:

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.htmlsite

Is the render farm workflow similar to this? I'm probably missing something here.

Thanks a lot, any help is highly appreciated!

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This issue is usually related to how Stand-in (.ass) assets are being handled on the render farm rather than a problem with Arnold itself. In most cases, missing or incorrect rendering comes from file path issues (textures or .ass files not being properly accessible on the farm), or differences in relative vs absolute paths between the local machine and render nodes. It can also happen if assets are not fully synchronized across all machines or if there are version mismatches in Arnold between the workstation and the farm. Ensuring consistent paths and properly shared assets usually resolves the problem.