Hey all!

I just purchased a Houdini Indie license (because Houdini is awesome!). I'm working on a render a 360 degree turnaround of a product for a friend, and my computer is a little outdated for rendering that many frames of a high resolution shaded object.

So, I've been trying to get Amazon EC2 working, having followed the docs I've found online I've set up an account with Amazon, set up the hq_render node with the appropriate settings, and get as far as where Amazon is booting up the cloud computer. Then it inevitably hangs and says that it was unable to upload the files, and to contact SESI for additional troubleshooting. I've found a few forum posts around (usually from around 2012 or so) regarding EC2, but the general advice I've been able to find is to follow the docs, which I have.

Has anyone run into this issue and know how to solve it? Is there more information I can supply to make this easier to troubleshoot?

- Houdini Version 14.0.361 (and 14.0.380, tried reinstalling to see if that would help)
- Windows 7 64 bit

There's also an error message I can see when I middle click on the hq_render node afterwards. Is there a way for me to access this error message through the console so I can copy and paste it here?

Thank you!

Alright, I found the logs on Amazon EC2, and everything seems to be running fine on their end. There's just a problem when I go to render from Houdini, where the files for some reason are not able to make it to the server.

When I first start up a machine on the cloud, it doesn't cause the error message on the HQueue node in Houdini, but every subsequent attempt to render while the EC2 machine is running causes an error in Houdini that says “Failed to save output to file”. I tried making a new test file where I just dropped in some basic geometry and materials, but it gives me the same errors.

Similar issues here - and the link to the Amazon support docs on Side FX is broken!

Did you ever sort it out? I'm trying to render one frame of one sphere… it gets up there and the fails!

https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=42161 [sidefx.com]