Objects found but not rendering on remote nodes

[gschrick]

I set up a screamernet on 2 computers, one with a dual processors (2 nodes) which is the host machine and another single processor as another node.

The host machine renders and saves my animations fine, as expected. But sometimes on the remote machine the node finds the objects (at least it says it does in DOS window),renders the frame, saves the tga file, but the frames come out black. It's taking a while to render as well, which leads me to believe it is rendering the objects. If it couldn't find the objects it would render in seconds and it would tell me that in the DOS window.

This only happens on some scenes, but everything is neatly contained in the content directory which is shared as the same drive letter on both computers.

Has anyone else run across such a problem? I can't figure out a common element to the scenes that cause problems. It's not a plugin problem, at least one of the problem scenes didn't use any plugins except an image saver and it's saving just fine.

[bgraves44]

It seems that when I encountered similar probs, (assuming that it is actually NOT a config problem) it was because I had objects (or image files) in the scene that were either not in my content directory or not referenced through my mapped drive letter. If I remember correctly, I just did a "replace object" with the same object, but navigated to it through my mapped drive letter. Resave and restart program (for good measure).

It really does sound like a config issue, though. SN is a picky thing. Quadruple check your .bat files. Syntax, syntax, syntax. I finally manage to get my 9 machine setup running reliably. It's pretty simple once you get it, but very unforgiving of mistakes.

Hope that helps.

[donny]

You can check what files are outside the content directory by using the Content Manager since it will list what objects are external of the content directory and which files are local. Just cancel out of it to not save the changes. Also you can open the scene file in notepad or wordpad to check for any hard paths.