Location of Forest Pack Pro log

[OC8312]

Hi,

I am attempting to investigate an issue affecting some nodes on a Render Farm using Forest Pack Pro.  Any idea where the log file for Forest Pack Pro would be on each render node?

[iToo]

Hi, Forest doesn't generate log files, because usually render problems are not caused directly by the plugin (missing assets, renderer issues, etc), and these cannot be logged from Forest.
What is the problem exactly ?

[OC8312]

Hi Carlos,

We currently run 2 licences of Forest Pack off a network server and 3 slaves however we are experiencing some issues across a couple of the render slaves.

We have 2 workstations that have the full version running and working. We have another 3 computers as our render farm slaves.
Whilst Forest Pack works locally on both these machines it only works on 1 out of the 3 render slaves over the network. Basically the renders work however where forest pack items are supposed to be, do not render as if they are not in the scene.

We're currently running 3ds Max 2014, Mental Ray and we use Deadline repository to net render.

In an attempt to resolve this we have uninstalled and re-installed Forest Pack a number of times to get this working with no joy.  The version we are using is 4.2.5.

Please note, we have also tried the Forest Tools Utility to no avail.

My request to find the logs was to see why it works on 1 render slave but not others.

Any help you can provide would be appreciated.

[iToo]

It's strange that the problem occurs also with Forest Tools, because in this case the generated items are standard Max objects, and there is not participation of Forest.
It would be a missing assets issue. Please, would you try to render a simple object (as a teapot) without textures ?

[OC8312]

Hi Carlos,

Thanks for the reply. All of our scenes render, its just the forest pack items that do not appear.

We tried scattering an un-textured number of teapots using Forest Pack, and the render finished with none of them appearing. Just to note, its not working on 2/3 nodes.

Thank you again.
SHH

[iToo]

Hi, please would you try again applying Forest Tools in the teapots scene ? Just to be sure.  You can even delete the Forest object from the scene, once converted.
Thanks,

[OC8312]

Hi Carlos,

Did as you said, yes the teapots worked with Forest tools. Please let us know you thoughts. If you have a couple of suggestions we could try to speed things up that would be great, as we're have a number of impending jobs that we need to get rendering.

Many thanks,

Adam

[iToo]

Ok, that has sense. Then probably the plugin is not being loaded in the failing nodes.
These are the critical files for Mental Ray rendering:

<max dir>\plugins\ForestPackPro.dlo
<max dir>\NVIDIA\shaders_autoload\mentalray\include\FShader3.mi
<max dir>\NVIDIA\shaders_autoload\mentalray\shaders\FShader3.dll

Please check these files are installed and are the same in all nodes. You can delete and copy them manually if needed.
An typical problem occurs when the Mental Ray shader (FShader3.dll) cannot be loaded. In this case, Max reports the following error:

PHEN 0.4     12 MB error  051011: shader "fs_geom3" not found

I'm not familiar with Deadline, but perhaps this error is reported in one of their logs.
Also you can try adding <max dir>\NVIDIA\shaders_autoload\mentalray\shaders to the Windows PATH routes, or copying FShader3.dll to any of these paths.

[OC8312]

Hi Carols,

Thanks a lot. We'll give that a go and report back. Fingers crossed.

Adam

[OC8312]

Hi,

We can confirm we match the Forest Pack Pro shader files are all in the correct locations, as per your suggested locations.. It didn't work unfortunately. Next step? 

Thanks
Adam

[iToo]

Is it possible to use Max interactively in the nodes, to load and render a test scene ?
In this way we would check if the problem is caused by the Max/plugin configuration or by Deadline.

[OC8312]

Hi,

By interactively we suspect you mean opening the scene directly in max on one of the affected nodes. Unfortunately as it is a node the 3ds max licence would not allow us to do this as it asks for a serial.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

[iToo]

You also would use a batch render for the test. Please, do this:

1) Unzip the content of the attached file in C:\
2) Edit renderTest.bat and set the path of your Max folder in line 2.
3) Run renderTest.bat

If there is some error with Mental Ray, it should be logged in the cmd window.

[OC8312]

Hi Carlos

Any ideas? We're still having issues.

Many thanks,

[iToo]

Hi, what was the result of the batch render test ?