Hello Everybody,

I'm having and issue with the Large Ocean and Small Ocean tools. When rendered locally, everything looks great on my system, but when I send it to the farm, it returns a flat ocean.

The method we are using is: baking the shot to IFDs and running them on Deadline though a Mantra Submit. Nothing crazy. Every other shot works like a charm, only the ocean tools are misbehaving.

I've been looking for an answer, but in the forums there is only one from 2015 and it was never answered. There is a good chance is something very simple (it always is), but I can't find anything on the documentation or online.

Sadly, I can't attach the file I'm working on because of powerful NDAs, but there is nothing to it. Slap a large ocean on the scene, bake it to IFDs and send it to the farm.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

A bit of an update.

I'm checking the logs from DeadLine. There are a couple of lines that may relate to this issue:

2018-12-11 11:26:07: 0: STDOUT: mantra: Variable indirect_comp (vector) not found for export in shader ‘opdefShop/v_arealight’
2018-12-11 11:26:07: 0: STDOUT: mantra: Variable direct_comp (vector) not found for export in shader ‘opdefShop/v_arealight’
2018-12-11 11:26:07: 0: STDOUT: mantra: Unable to load texture ‘fHoudiniProjects//tex/environments/envSunset.hdr’
2018-12-11 11:26:09: 0: STDOUT: mantra: Variable indirect_comp (vector) not found for export in shader ‘opmat/oceanvolume’
2018-12-11 11:26:09: 0: STDOUT: mantra: Variable direct_comp (vector) not found for export in shader ‘opmat/oceanvolume’
2018-12-11 11:26:09: 0: STDOUT: mantra: Variable indirect_comp (vector) not found for export in shader ‘opmat/oceansurface’
2018-12-11 11:26:09: 0: STDOUT: mantra: Variable direct_comp (vector) not found for export in shader ‘opmat/oceansurface’

I made a pre-flight of my scene under the $JOB category and there are some missing paths. I will fix and see what happens.

UPDATE: after the $JOB shenanigans, things got worst, so I went back to the original file. As far as the forums and Google say, I'm OK working with $HIP. I think the problem comes to the materials. Although in the save_spectra ROP the saving path is $HIP/geo/blah… the material reinterprets that and changes to the full path, including F… I checked the IFD file and yes, every path “turns” to F… which makes rendering in the farm not possible.

Also, that log is looking for stuff on “Shop/”, but it is empty on my scene.

So, now to try and solve those problems I guess. Unless one of you wants to shine a light on my life

Thanks in advance!

RESOLUTION:

The problem came down to path names. The configuration we have at the moment is not taking into account Houdini needs, but I could fix everything by giving explicit paths to each file requested by Mantra to bake IFDs in a way that the clients/slaves could find them on an improvised file server we put up to test this.

Now that we know this, we will design a proper render farm that takes Houdini's needs into account.

Although Deadline is not HQueue, the principles are the same. For anyone else experiencing this problem, I recommend taking a look at THIS LINK [www.sidefx.com] and check the diagram, which in my case made me face-palm so hard, I got a concussion.

Cheers!