Problems with variables expanded during ifd generation

[melazoma]

Hi all,

I'm running into a little problem with variables like $HIP and $JOB, etc are expanded into full paths when the scene is turned into an ifd.

We're doing setup and ifd generation on Windows, and the ifd will be rendered somewhere off-site. So I have no idea what the starting path will be.

I can keep a project folder structure, but I can't have any path names before my project folder look different than the project's network location.

So suppose I have in UNC path //path/to/project on our network; and the offsite renderfarm has //different/path/to/project, I will need some way to keep the variable un-expanded and hopefully Mantra will pick them up and expand them according to the current site.

The ifd format helpcard in H9.5 (http://localhost:48626/rendering/ifd) says

ifdPathTest.hip

[rdg]

I'm running into a little problem with variables like $HIP and $JOB, etc are expanded into full paths when the scene is turned into an ifd.

Maybe this helps?

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com...amp;revdate=off

Can you protect $VARNAME with \$VARNAME... you could make a python

script to put the backslash there on the preRenderScript field of the ROP.

[melazoma]

Maybe this helps?

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com...amp;revdate=off

Hi, thanks for the link, searching along the line of breaking the ifd file with extraneous characters in order to preserve the $VAR variables as suggested by this mailing list thread, I've decided to surround my variables with single quotes. That works as far as variable preservation is concerned, but the ifd doesn't render because of the single quotes.

So I tried writing a simple python filter that removes every single quote in an ifd file (script attached), but somehow the first line "import mantra" is not working.

I followed the example filter in the mantra rendering with python help page (http://localhost:48626/rendering/python). Can any one please take a look at it?