mantra distributed not loading textures

[mhaupt]

Hey guys,

I'm trying to get HQueue and distributed rendering to work. By now, the rendering of jobs in HQueue is working (textures are loaded). What bugs me is that the -H command is rendering geo but can't find textures stored on the network shares. If I use a tex which is saved on the rendering client itself everything is working fine.

All machines involved use houdini-15.0.416.

The hqueue runs on linux, license server is win, clients and workstations are also win. I'm using the .bat file to start the clients and the hserver service on the remote clients runs with an admin-account. Also clients and workstations can read and write on the shares.

The path to the texture is build with the $HIP variable and has forward slashes "/".

IP ranges are also not the problem. Server, Workstations and Clients are all in 192.168.1.xxx range.

Is there a documentation about how the distribution actually works? (Is there also some kind of IFD generation?) I got the feeling the data isn't reaching the clients specified with the -H command.

 

I hope you understand what my problem is, my brain is quite exhausted by now. Thank's in advance for the help!

Edited April 20, 2016 by mhaupt

[fathom]

i haven't used hqueue, but mantra itself uses the -H flag to distribute renders so the issue may or may not be hqueue related.  you could try manually launching a mantra task with -H to help isolate the issue.

regarding ifd's... my guess is that the ifd is fed to a single mantra task and then it handles telling the other mantra instances what to do (probably by means of forwarding the ifd content for the most part).

if you're on linux, it should be relatively easy to generate an ifd and verify it works and then push that same ifd to a mantra -H call to see how it responds.

 

[mhaupt]

thanks for the reply fathom. I'm a small step closer now.

You're right, for distributed rendering you don't need hqueue at all. Even without the hqueue client the DR works but still without textures.

I tried rendering an IFD from the mantra console with the -H command which is not working at all. There is no network traffic from the hserver or mantra on the client this way.

Not sure if it's a pathing problem since the paths are hardcoded: mantra -f H:/projects/test023.ifd H:/projects/console_render_023.tif -H Client01

The line above ist working loacally (without the -H)

If I use the -H command out of Houdini I get network traffic on the client at least.

My next attempt is to get proper logfiles from hserver and mantra.

[mhaupt]

UPDATE: IT'S WORKING!

I was thinking way to deep into the problem. It was as simple as entering the tex in a proper UNC path: //server04/HQueue/projects/01.rat

vars like $HIP are not working properly

Edited April 21, 2016 by mhaupt

[Mzigaib]

I was having the same problem in Linux the way I solve it is modifying the /etc/hosts file like:

machine_01 192.168.0.2
machine_02 192.168.0.4

And so forth, now I can use the machine names and variables instead of UNC paths.

I hope that helps.

Cheers!