[choo-chee]

Hello, after rendering an urgent render over-night on all my 4 quads, everything looked good until one of the servers suddenly disconnected during the "wirting final mxi" proccess. what can be done to save the work? I quickly re-started it as a server but it just re-started rendering and instead of having a nice SL 18 image I have a SL 0.5 image !!!!! my ass is on the line here ...

[Tim Ellis]

It usually happens to me during the merging process. One node will crash out. Worst thing you can do is force the node to restart the render by restarting the MXCL server.

The local cooperative.mxi for the node that crashed, will now be sl0.5 because you restarted the render, which unfortunately for you is now a nightmare.

So you will have to grab the most recent cooperative_aux.mxi from the node that merged the mxi last and load that into MXCL to save out your render.

Grab the cooperative_aux.mxi file from the node. Usually found in C:\Documents and Settings\INSERT NODE USER NAME HERE\Local Settings\Temp. This is a hidden location, so make sure you have 'Hidden file types' visible in the folder options for the node.

When this happens again, don't restart the server on the crashed node, but check the other nodes, to see which merged the cooperative_aux.mxi file last.
Merge that most recent cooperative_aux.mxi with the crashed node's cooperative.mxi.

Here's a batch file I use for manually recovering the cooperative.mxi files from nodes for merging them. Adjust the file paths etc to suit your network. Copy paste the text to notepad and save the file with .bat extension, then just double click it to run it.

Code: Select all

copy \\dell-octo-10\Temp10\cooperative.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative10.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-09\Temp09\cooperative.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative09.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-08\Temp08\cooperative.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative08.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-07\Temp07\cooperative.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative07.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-06\Temp06\cooperative.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative06.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-05\Temp05\cooperative.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative05.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-04\Temp04\cooperative.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative04.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-03\Temp03\cooperative.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative03.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-02\Temp02\cooperative.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative02.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-01\Temp01\cooperative.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative01.mxi

& one for cooperative_aux.mxi files:-

Code: Select all

copy \\dell-octo-08\Temp08\cooperative_aux.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative08.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-07\Temp07\cooperative_aux.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative07.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-06\Temp06\cooperative_aux.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative06.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-05\Temp05\cooperative_aux.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative05.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-04\Temp04\cooperative_aux.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative04.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-02\Temp02\cooperative_aux.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative02.mxi
copy \\dell-octo-01\Temp01\cooperative_aux.mxi N:\Maxwell\Coop_MXI_store\cooperative01.mxi

Hope this helps,


Tim.

[choo-chee]

thanx !!!!
p.s. - NL, how about fixing that issue ...