mac clients submitting to a PC based farm

[jbrandibas]

Hello,

  I have several mac based clients running Maya that need to be able to submit to our render farm, which we are converting to be PC based due to cost/performance issues.  We have been running XServe's as render nodes for a couple of years now and both the PC and mac clients always worked fine, but now that I am adding PC's to the farm, none of the mac clients can use them because the jobs fail due to pathing issues. 

Basically, what I have done to get both macs and PC's to work on the XServe's is on all the mac machines, I have an automount setup that automatically mounts the share to a directory on the root of the drive.  So my directory structure is /server/share, where /server is a directory I created and I am using it as a mount point for the share.  When a PC submits to the mac based servers, the mac's recognizes the //server/share without an issue.  But now that I have PC render nodes, they can't recognize the /server/share format, which is what happens when I submit from a mac client.

On all of the clients, I am using the Maya job type and I am submitting the job from the Maya interface.  The mac clients access their projects in the /server/share format, and the PC clients access their projects through the \\server\share format.

Does anyone know of a way to get the maya job type on a mac to work correctly with a PC based farm?  I am guessing that I may have to edit the MEL/Perl scripts, which is no big deal, as long as someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks,

[Scot Brew]

QubeGUI submission dialogs do have the hooks for submit-time path translation.  This is currently being used at a number of studios to convert paths just like you mention from OSX to PC. 

See the posting "Q&A: How do I setup submission-side path translation in the QubeGUI?" for details.

http://support.pipelinefx.com/smf/index.php?topic=564.0

The upcoming QubeGUI 5.5 release should make this even easier by exposing the path translation as a general QubeGUI preference.

[jbrandibas]

That is awesome news about 5.5.  I am sure that there are a lot of people that will be very happy about that.  I can't wait to see how it is implemented.

After I posted my small novel, I went ahead and traced through the submission scripts and found where the project and scene directories are generated in the Maya jobtype.  I modified the qubeSubmitJob.mel file to add a leading "/" to the path and now everything works great.  All I need to do now is push the new mel file to all the clients and I should be good for now.

Thanks for the quick response.