help understanding image path string user data and team render?

[Shawn_Kearney1]

I found an oddity in Team Render, and was hoping I could get some help understanding it better.

I am using a MacOS workstation with six Windows-based render nodes. I needed to render an image sequence texture, but had to offset the first frame so that the texture sequence started later in the animation, so the easiest way to do this that I could think of was to use a python xpresso node to format the path string and use user_data_string to get the right image file on the specified frame, holding the last and first frames. Easy peasy.

It all worked great, except when I tried rendering to the PC servers, I was met with:

(Error) Render-Job failed: Saving failed.

This was resolved by using a relative path to the tex folder and finally specifying the texture search path. It works fine, but I'm kind of confused why it couldn't download the texture files on the fly as it normally does? Why did my script trip up Team Render?

[peter.horvath6V6K3]

In Team Render the assets (e.g. textures) are downloaded to the local preferences folder (e.g. $HOME/Library/Preferences/MAXON/CINEMA 4D R1X...). I suppose the absolute path you generate in the xpresso node refers to the path on the server which is not valid when the scene is evaluated on the client.