User manual

© Next Limit Technologies 2010
Maxwell Render 2.5 User Manual
Chapter 11. The Network System | 92
For example, your texture folder may be c:/mytextures, which is shared. Your computer
name is “renderbox1” which is part of the Workgroup named “farm”. Browse from My
Network Places> Microsoft Windows Network> farm> renderbox1> my textures. The
path for the texture will then be
\\renderbox1\mytextures\texture.jpg.
You can also type directly in the File name input of the File Browser: \\renderbox1 and
your mytextures folder will appear in the list of shared folders. In this case it is not
necessary to also move your textures to the same shared folder as the MXS.
• You can keep your textures in a shared folder and when adding the job through
the Add Job Wizard, you can specify this shared folder in the “Textures” dialog.
Using a mapped network drive
In case you are connecting to a folder as a mapped network drive, make sure you have
added this folder as a mapped drive to all the servers, using the same drive letter.
Firewalls
If you are having problems detecting the nodes in your network, disable your rewall.
11.07.01 Network tips for Mac OSX
For multi-platform compatibility reasons, all the network paths in Maxwell Render are
in UNC format by default. Mac OSX cannot handle UNC paths natively and so some
transformations are needed. These transformations cannot always be done automatically,
so keep the following tips in mind to make network rendering much easier when using
Mac OSX.
• Checking the “Send Dependencies” option will be faster and more reliable in most
cases.
• In a multi-platform environment, it’s preferable to use Mac OSX machines only as
render nodes.
• When launching the render from a Mac OSX machine (and if the Manager is not in
the same machine as the Monitor), the output path must be understandable and
accessible from the Manager machine.
• If the Manager is a Mac OSX machine, selecting a local path will save the le in the
same local path (if it exists) as the Manager. Using the “Retry” button of the local path
warning dialog will convert this local path to a network path. This means the les will
be saved in the referring path, but the selected local path must be located in you user
folder (or in any of its subfolders) or in any secondary drive.
• If the Manager is a Windows machine, a network UNC path must be written by the
user, or a Windows shared folder must be selected in the dialog.
• When “Send Dependencies” is not selected, the texture path has the same limitations
as mentioned in previous point, but now for all the nodes in the network.
11.07.02 Network tips for Linux
Linux can have problems with UNC by default, so a workaround is needed.
To make Linux work with network paths for textures or other dependencies, it is possible
to use this hack:
Let’s suppose you want to access:
\\MyServer\Share1\texture.jpg.
The workaround consists of creating a folder in the root of the rendernode le system
(hanging from / ) named MyServer (case sensitive), and inside MyServer, a folder named
Share1.
Now, you can mount the shared resource \\MyServer\Share1 in the folder /MyServer/
Share1 (pay attention to the particular back and forward slashes) using this command as
root:
mount -t cifs //ip-of-the-server-MyServer/Share1 /MyServer/Share1
-ousername=an-authorized-user,password=the-appropriate-password
If you have smbfs module loaded in your kernel, then you can do:
mount -t smbfs //Myserver/Share1 /Myserver/Share1
For example: if the IP of MyServer was 10.10.10.1, then:
mount -t cifs //10.10.10.1/Share1 /MyServer/Share1