I've got a few characters I brought over from Max via alembic (File->Import->Alembic Scene)

Setup my RIS rop and shader network. Renders perfectly on my local machine.
However, when I submit to Hqueue (two other machines) they're not there! I have them placed over a simple box I made in Houdini and that renders fine across Hqueue- but that's it!

Any ideas as to why I can render perfectly fine locally but get HG Wells' results via Hqueue?
No errors or warning when looking at Hqueue. The frames just a post a very misleading “succeeded.” Other renderman tests I've done (without alembic) work great on my little render farm so I'm at a loss!

Tested with a simpler scene thinking it had something to do with either my shader/textures or the geometry itself. I made a sphere in max and applied a noise modifier to give it some animation and exported it to an alembic file. In Houdini locally it works great! I can see it but when I submit to Hqueue it goes blank!

The plot thickens!

I was able to submit to GridMarkets and it worked! So the issue must be on my render network. My guess is for some reason the render machines can't see the alembic files. That's odd though since they're in the same path as my hip file that it can pull no problem!

I've had a similar experience with Hqueue recently. If you aren't already, you might want to try switching all your input alembic file paths to Windows UNC paths, assuming you are on Windows. (Output rops still need to use $HIP/$JOB).

Good idea! Currently all of my files live on my G drive on my render machines which is really just a mapped drive on my NAS.

I've had issues with Hqueue not wanting to write frames unless my $JOB value is UNC.

That would explain why the GridMarkets render worked.

I'll give it a shot! Thanks for the tip.

BTW what render engine were you using when you had similar issues?

Strange- I tried that and it failed!
Also tried copying a test alembic file to Ctest/alembic.abc and each render node (and of course changining the input path in my scene). Still a no go!

Luckily I was able to export FBX files from Max and that worked. Not ideal but it works!

Just stumbled across this… just in case anyone is having the same issue, I solved it on both my home network and one at work by changing the houdini_access_method to 2

Hope that helps someone! Alembic works much better in our pipeline than FBX most of the time!