Error reading only alembic data to a synology NAS raid drive

[eebling 0]

So I have an odd problem I haven't been able to figure out yet. I have a Synology DS716+II NAS raid and using it as a shared drive so I can use HQueue to render jobs on other machines. That all works fine to render on the farm, however when I write alembic data to the NAS, I get an error everytime I try to read it back into Houdini or into maya. If I write the exact same alembic data to a local drive on my computer, then there are no read errors. And this seems to only happen with alembic and fbx data. I can write hip files and bgeo's all day to the network drive and everything reads fine, just alembic and fbx data that fails when trying to read it back from the Network drive. Does this make sense to anyone.? I would think if this was a firewall problem or permissions type thing, then no data should read or write to the NAS. The exact error I get when trying to read alembic data back into Houdini from the network drive is "Error evaluating alembic file". ANy help would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

E

[eebling 0]

Well I was able to find some info about an environment variable named HOUDINI_ACCESS_METHOD and a suggestion in another thread about setting it to a value of 1 (0 by default). That did not fix the alembic or fbx load problems, but setting it to a value of 2 did. This is on a windows system. Can anyone shed some light as to why hip files and sim data and rendered images(exr's) would all read and write fine to the NAS drive with that variable set to a default of 0, but fbx and abc data was not able to read/write correctly.? Does Houdini somehow write those two file types out with different permissions or something.? 

 

Thanks for any info.

 

E

[Atom 846]

I know that you can't have a space in the file name, or Alembic read will fail. Maybe somewhere in your network path you have a space character?

[eebling 0]

Thanks for the reply. There are no odd naming conventions happening, no spaces, usually use underscores or go with camelCase. Now all is working after changing the HOUDINI_ACCESS_METHOD  to be equal to 2, but still unclear as to why other data like hip's and bgeo's worked before changing the variable.

[octaviuz 0]

same here!

 

i had a DS411, got a DS1817, load file...error!! very odd...will change the vairalbe you say see if that woks on my end...anyone has figured out how to fix this, maybe on the Synology NAS end?

[grendizer 0]

Eebling God bless you for your post! I had the same problem and was pulling my hair. I thought I would never resolve it but thankfully I found your thread!

My problem is exactly the same : working on the local D: drive, I imported FBX and Alembic files into my Houdini scene. I didn't have bgeo files. When I opened the file through the network drive N: FBX files appeared normally, but the Alembic files were invisible.

Other thing I tested was to import the same Alembic file in a new scene and it failed.

Then I followed your advice and all went well!

Question : my NAS, on which I mapped the N drive, is also a Synology. Does it happen only with Synology hardware?

Or perhaps it's because the NAS has a different login than Windows...

 

Edited August 27, 2018 by grendizer

[octaviuz 0]

I think it is due to a permission issue on the DSM end combined with alembic,,,not sure how to fix it other than the ACCESS METHOD