Network Rendering - Change network mapped drives

Hey guys,

I had Network rendering all up and running just fine, and due to workflow constraints I had to change the drive letter of network mapped drives. I manually changed the loaders to point to the new drive letter and in Fusion I can preview render, and if I render locally everything behaves correctly. When I send the comp to render over the network, the network render comes with errors "Loader5_1 failed to load file....." and is defaulting to the previously mapped network drive. I've tried saving as a few times to try to correct the problem, but network rendering still wants to connect to the old mapped network drive letter.

Just to make sure I had all the workstations mapped correctly, I only enabled the local machine to be part of the network rendering service, and the local workstation still fails and tries to reconnect to the previously mapped network drive, even though the same workstation renders when not using the network rendering option.

Any thoughts?

Have you changed the pathmap in comp preferences? I.e. \\oldpath to \\newpath

Make sure the nodes can now see this new drive letter.

To avoid issues with mapped drive letters, use UNC paths instead. If they're too long, pathmap them to something more user-friendly.

Through learning more about the Console view I was able to track down a loader not finding source media. The local machine was seeing the network drive as an IP address rather than a mapped drive. So when I tried to network render the local machine that was acting like a node was finding the IP location, but couldn't see the mapped drive. Thanks for all the feedback.

Chad, can you point to a resource for UNC paths? A quick google search gets me a definition, not necessarily best practices. Thanks!

If you use UNC paths, you don't have to worry about drive letter mappings and what can go wrong when you decide to migrate or have clashes.

For Windows, it would be something like \\Server\Share\File.ext. This lets you create a share and every machine (with permission) can access it without them first having to map it.

Thanks Chad, i'll run some tests and see how it goes. Cheers.