question

Does it fail locally or only on the farm (Team Render)?

Team Render clients download the assets from the server, so the plugin has to specify where the assets (e.g. ASS files) are located. The content of a procedural is basically hidden from the plugin, and you have a procedural inside a procedural, so basically the plugin does not know about the low level ASS files. You have to specify those on the Assets tab of your Arnold Procedural in your main scene. (If they are in the tex folder then just set the file name.)

However if it also fails locally (without Team Render) then it should be something else. Let me know.

Hi Peter!

Thanks for taking time to help me :)

So far I've only worked locally. The low level assets have been specified in the Top-Level Assets (entered the file name), and ALL assets are in the tex folder.

I just tried entering "./tex" in the Procedural Search Path and now it seems to be working again - but to be honest, I'm not 100% sure if that's really the fix.

Because as mentioned in my opening post, when I first converted all the assets etc. it worked perfectly fine, and then after restarting the IPR/C4D it all of the sudden didn't work anymore. So it just sporadically out of nowhere stopped working, so I'm not 100% convinced yet, that everything is fine now, because if I understood correctly, I shouldn't have to enter any search path when the assets are in the tex folder.

One thought that came to my mind:

In the Top-Level Assets I reference the Low-Level assets in the Assets tab. Could it be, that when I only enter the file name of the Low-Level assets, that they might not be found because somehow Arnold thinks of the tex folder as the root folder (since the asset is located there), and so by only entering the file name searches for a "second tex folder" inside the actual tex folder?

I'm not sure I'm making 100% sense here, but I'm quite confused right now, because I just can't figure out how at first this worked and then just stops :/

Thanks again! :)

That error is because a nested procedural has just the filename, with no path. If there was any path, it would be in the message.

"C4DtoA | 00:00:56 7039MB ERROR| [ass] can't read in Vegetation_Carpinus_J.ass: No such file or directory".

Hi Stephen,

thanks for taking the time to help!

I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean or much rather how I would set this up correctly. I thought if all Assets are in the tex folder no paths are needed. Also I can't use absolute paths, because I need to send this job to a renderfarm later on.

Here is a screenshot of the way I set it up:

OK, I think I see where the problem is. The plugin finds the assets in export time, and so it can send them to the TR client, but it does not actually add the tex folder to the search path. So the low-level assets are not found in render time. Adding ./tex to the search path is not a good workaround, because it's relative to the current working directory, which is undefined inside C4D (not necessarily the project root). This is definitely a bug with nested procedurals. I'll try to fix this on Monday and send you a build.

That would be awesome Peter! As always thanks for the great support! :)

Could you please try this build? Let me know if the issue is still there.

https://safeshare.solidangle.com/index.php/s/CA5VRslOwaqPhCl

password: 9h5XZWAN

Hi Peter,

thanks for the new build! I gave it a try, but I again run into some inconsitencies. As far as I can tell the path issue seems to be resolved, but on my first try I got following error messages:

After that I did nothing but deactivate/activate the Procedurals and restart the render a few times and then the Procedurals all of the sudden rendered fine without any problems at all.

I could see that the error messages might occur because I directly convert Cloner-/Surface Spread Objects to ASS, but what I don't get is why they sometimes work and sometimes don't, without anything having changed in the scene/settings.

I only tested for an hour so far, so nothing I said here is 100% certain. If I can help testing in any way let me know!

Thanks again! :)

It might be a collision in node names. Nodes are identified by names, so if two nodes (two shaders for instance) have the same name in two different procedurals, they collide and the result depends on which procedural is loaded first. You can avoid this if you specify different namespaces per procedural.

I'm not completely sure that's the problem with your scene, but the inconsistencies might come from that.

Btw, if you can reproduce the issue and send me a scene, then I can take a closer look.