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I'm doing a network render and for some reason the mxi's are not merging. Some of the files will have the mxi's in the temp location after a render and some, the folders will be empty. I've checked paths on everything and paths are correct. Any ideas about what is going on here?

I attached an image of the manager showing the difference between an in progress render and a finished. In the yellow you can see that it says one computer's image is at SL0 and the other computer's image is at 10.442 (which is the same SL as the final image). Whereas in the green, it shows an in progress render where you can clearly see both computers are making progress in shader levels.

Also, to note...i go to the temp files to see if there are the mxi's in there. The folders are completely empty, but the time stamp on the folders tells me they were recently modified.

Thanks for the help!



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Try unc path instead

http://compnetworking.about.com/od/wind ... c-name.htm
or
www.google.com

thanks for the link. unfortunately that goes a bit over my head in terms of using this with maxwell for setting up a network render. i'm not really sure which computer or where I would be using the UNC path on or even exactly how this would help solve the issue. Sorry for all the questions, I'm just pretty ignorant on this issue. Thanks.

Maxwell network requires that nodes (operative system level) can access the same folders over network.
That means you need to have one folder shared over all computers.

Google "create windows xp shared folder tutorial" and you will be just fine

ahhhh ok, that helps put it in context and makes sense. I'll check that out. Thanks.

So, i'm making some progress with this. I have all the paths updated to network paths and made sure everything is shared that needs to be. Although I keep running into two issues....

When I open up the mxi that was supposedly merged, the SL does not match the SL that hte Network Monitor is saying it should be.
The second issue is that for some reason, maxwell is still not creating mxi files in the \Local\Temp\mxnetwork\manager\job_12 file location. It creates a folder in there, but leaves the folder empty.

Seems like it's still not actually merging, even though it's not giving me any errors?

1) by how much?

2) how's your settings on each computer for nodes and monitor & manager?

3) So still no cut down in render time?, try with a simple scene no textures and no extra stuff, just a box like the cornell scene.

1)Regarding the difference in SL....it originally would be the final mxi SL would match one of the unmerged mxi files. This lead me to believe they were not getting merged. But now, its is just
completely arbitrary. I looked at the final mxi and checked the time stamp to make sure it was a new one...the SL was 9....Monitor told me it should've been 17. I have no idea where it got an
SL 9 from?

2)I left settings at defult, minus updating the path for saving to be a network compatible location

3)I'm not really sure if I can test this at this point, since I'm not sure if the finals are actually getting merged.

posts of my manager and monitor with most recent settings.




Everything in here is leading me to believe things are working ok, but looking at the final mxi and image are a totally different story.

I'm doing a test tonight by sending a non cooperative render to the one node over the network to see if the mxi from that machine finishes at the correct SL and is correctly deposited on the main machine. Just to make sure that machine can access everything correctly and that it's not a sharing/permissions issue. I'll post an update once I see results.

Ok, I just got results back...from the test, the save MXI using the single machine over the network says it's SL 13.46. The monitor says SL 16. Maybe it's just a bug with the monitor giving displaying the wrong SL? Next Limit told me there there was a bug where sometimes the monitor would say SL 0 sometimes so maybe that's related to this bug? Have you had any results of mismatched SL similar to this?

I can't help you, sorry. Maybe it's write permissions over network or faulty install of MX or OS.

Thanks for your help Aji, sorry for being a pain in the ass about this! it's just one of those problems that I don't know enough about to really troubleshoot myself. You've filled me in alot about the network process which helps a ton. Sooooon, I'll get it figured out.