Missing textures in network render

Support Lighting and Rendering
#1

Hi everyone.

I am trying to use the network rendering integrated in blender.

Im setting up the farm on some Mac dual xeon workstation. Things more or less work, in the way that every node renders its chunks, there are no errors and in the end I get my images.

Problem is on some chunk textures are missing. Just on some chunk randomly. I tried making files path absolute and relative, I tried pack images into the blend, but the result is always the same. Some random junk has empty textures.

This is really weird, also because checkin the log of the missing textures frames everything seems fine. There are no error messages and the textures that are missing seem to be loaded correctly.

I am using 2.65.

Do you have any idea what could be the problem?

Thanks!

#2

I have read something similar in the german forum blend.polis.
There someone has nearly the same problem with mac. But he doesn’t use network rendering.
On his rendering the missing textures are not random, they start missing after some hundred frames. There I think it’s a problem with RAM. Maybe some memory leak in rendering with mac OS?
I have no mac, can’t test it.

I have tested networkrendering in the amazon EC2 cloud. There I have had a lot of problems with pathes to textures, too.
There the problems are in different OS on client (Win) and master/slaves(Ubuntu Linux). But this was fixed by using packed textures inside blend files.
Packed textures are bad, bec. you have to upload everytime all the textures again (with the blend).
Remarkable, that this is no solution for your problem on your macs.

I think the network code would need some more love from the devs to work better with different OS in the network.

#3

thanks for the answer. Looks like we could have found the problem.

We had client and master on different computers. So we putted client and master on the same computer (the one where the project is located) and now everything looks fine.

Could be that the fact that there were more steps for the projects to do on the net (client, master, slaves) created some problems. Now client do not have to send anything by net to the master.