ScreamerNet II Problem

[ThreeDBFX]

OK, don't bite my head off if this has been addressed before. I did a search and didn't find the answer I'm looking for.

That being said, here's what I'm dealing with:

I've setup ScreamerNet II to run on 2 of my machines. I set everything up just like the tutorial I'm doing tells me. I run LWSN.exe on both systems, all is fine. I then open LW and go to Network Rendering and initialize the CPU's, all is fine. When I finally render the aniamtion. the host machine renders like it should, but the second machine (node 2) seems to render really really fast. When the rendering is complete, only the frames from the host machine are rendered.

Now, in the LW manual on page 19.8 under Troubleshooting, it says "If images seem to render unrealistically fast and no images are saved:

1. Check to make sure that you have full sharing access across the network. This is done through Windows NT Explorer. You can check this by copying a file at random back and forth accross the network.

2. If the scene and/or objects were created without taking into concideration the new drive path names, rendering may occur on only the host machine."


OK...my problem is definitly number 2, so what the hell does their explanation mean? I'm no networking expert here, and that explanation seems a bit vague. Can anyone help?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

ThreeDBFX

[iluvatar]

I'll throw a guess:

all objects and other used files in the scene should have "relative paths" in the scene file, not "absolute paths"... open your scene file in wordpad or something alike, and you'll notice something like:

LoadObjectLayer 1 C:documents and Settings/Administrator/My Documents/Smeaggie 3Design/LW Projects/Dam Bord/Objects/bord.lwo

this is an absolute path, wich will be found on your renderserver (cause there's th scene), but NOT on your render clients. The client will search in C:doc<etc> and won't find the objects. The paths should be relative, meaning if you have a dir structure like this:

<project>
|
|-- <scenes>
|
|-- <objects>

then in your scene file, all objects should be loaded from "../objects/<etc>" now it will use the path of the scenefile (wich is on your network share) as base path, so it will find all stuff needed... anyone knows how to tell LW to save relative paths in the scenefile anyway? thnx

hope this helps a bit!

[richpr]

Most likely a path issue in the scene file...

In order to get around that...

On your host machine...map a drive (L: ) to your own machine to where the scenes, objects & images are stored, for instance to \\host1\3DFiles...

In this case host1 is the name of the PC and 3DFiles is a share you create for the content folder...

So now you have an L: drive, so what? Well, build your scenes and objects only using the L: drive on the host machine... All paths are correctly stored in the scenes (also saved on L:\Scenes\whatever.lws.

Now on clients you only need to map a drive, called.... L: to your host where all the content is stored...and run LWSN... Everything points to L: and works like a charm... well here it does...

One more important thing: (I forget this one sometimes). Make sure that under render options, the RGB files are saved to L:\whatever as well... (Of course the clients would need to be able to write to the share.... (Share permissions and file permissions!)

Hope this helps...

[richpr]

My L: has the following folders...

L:\ (mapped to \\Host1\3D)
- Images
- LWSN
- Objects
- Plugins
- Scenes

The config files are located in the LWSN folder as well... as is LWSN.exe. It is also the command folder for job and ack files.

[iluvatar]

should work...

[richpr]

If you set your content folder in Layour to L:\ you're good to go and never have to edit files for use in just LW or with SN2...

Actually this setup works with Lightnet too...

[ThreeDBFX]

Thanks for all the help guys.

In the tutorial I did. I was instructed to map a drive on my node machine where the Lightwave directory was. I did, and I mapped it to L. It told me to make a Command folder and a Configs(which has all my config files in it)Folder, I did this as well. The way my current directory is set up now is:

C:\3D\Demo_Title

The 3D folder is where I put all of my projects. They're all in their own folders with their own directory structuer, i.e. objects, scenes, images, etc...

So this is where I'm a bit confused. Do I map a drive to my project folder for the current project I'm workin on? Or do I make a master folder that is mapped and move all my files to it? Is there a way to tell the all the machines to use the current "3D" directory I currently have setup as my content directory, and will the nodes be able to look into the sub-folders for the correct files?
Sorry if I sound really moronic here, but PC networking is still very new to me coming from a strictly mac background, and I'm not a networking kinda person.


Thanks,

ThreeDBFX

[ResPower]

You gotta think of it in terms of point of view. Each LWSN needs to find your objects and images. How will it find them?

Each computer is standing out there on your network and it needs to see the following things:

1) Source files
2) Program & Plugins

If a computer can't see them, it won't render right.

Not only must it be able to see the source files, it must be able to see them in exactly the same way as you stored them in your scene and object files. You're telling Lightwave where they are whether you know it or not. Whenever you load up a file, you're basically storing directions on how to find them.

If you got a texture file that's stored as

C:\Documents and Settings\Pic1.bmp

In a scene or object, then every computer's got to see it exactly the same way. So you have to have Pic1.bmp on the C:\ drive in the folder "Documents and Settings"

Basically, the computer can't go, "OH! I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN. YOU MEAN THE PICTURE Pic1.Bmp. It's not under "documents and settings" like you told me, but, yeah, I'll use that file that's in a totally different place!" Computers don't do that.

This means that you need to put your pictures and objects in a place that all the computers can see, AND you need modify your objects and images so that, when a scene is loaded, LWSN is actually looking for them in the right place.

"Telling" lightwave where the files are can be accomplished in one of two ways:

1. Hard-Coding paths. Basically, you make a scene file and as you make your scene you load objects from one spot, you load images from another spot, wherever you can find them on your big, messy hard drive. As you load them, LW stores their hard coded path. "C:\Documents and Settings\Pic1.Bmp"; "C:\project25\deepdown\blahblah\mypictureisdownhere somewhere\pic2.bmp"

Hard-Coded paths are BAD.

2. Relative Paths. This is what the content directory for lightwave is all about. You set your content directory in Lightwave. You have a scenes directory, and objects directory, and an image directory. When you set the content directory, what happens is, any objects or images stored in the content directory will be stored in a lightwave scene or object like this:

\images\pic1.bmp

And it adds the content directory to it:

C:\Documents and Settings\Content\ + \images\pic1.bmp

So that lightwave can find the image.

When you follow the lightwave content directory structure, you can move scenes, objects, and images around to different hard drives and you can make them work without that stupid "Can't find image!!!" error.

If you think of it as trying to make all computers see exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, LWSN is a snap.