mograph, text objects and baking cloners...

[Mylenium]

Hey, it's me again.

Now I that I finally have all my textobjects (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=440258) the way I want them I'm running in another problem, most likely connected to the problem I described earlier.

When I NET-render all my textobjects are gone again. I get black frames.

My scenes are pretty simple. I have an animated cam, an enviroment (with fog enabled) and a null. The null contains a random effector and a mograph cloner, which again has various extrude-nurbs textobjects as childs. The cloner is baked. All this baking was done by a co-worker on a Mac workstation. I get the files from him and set all the rendersettings and send the scenes off to NET-render.

It all went well for various comparable scenes. Until now -
Now when I open the scene, the baked clones (aka the text) won't show. I don't know why all of a sudden it won't show anymore. So what I do is: I relink the textobjects' font to a Postscript-font on my disk. And voilà: it works and renders fine.
Remember that the cloner is still baked.

Now when I send that off to the renderclients they screw up and the text doesn't show again.

This really confuses me. Srek stated earlier (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=440258) that from v9.6 on even if I don't have the actual used font on my system the text should show as long as I don't change it. It somehow is translated into geometry that is saved within the file. At least that's how I understood him.

I suspect this all to be some problem connected to mograph, because all the text that is not in the cloner works fine, as long as I don't change it. (I MAY change it, but then I have to relink the font and then, of course, it works ok.)

I really don't have too much confidence that you can help me here, this seems like a tricky thing. But _maybe_ somebody experienced some comparable difficulties with mograph/text/netrender?

Oh. And let's not even talk about the deadline. Sigh.

I don't think MoGraph objects cache the geometry, especially the text object, as it's fully dynamic. The cache tag itself only stores transformations. I believe Srek's post only extends to text splines. Working on the same platform as your Net render machines and having the fonts properly installed on all of them seems inevitable.

Mylenium

[maximee]

Thanks Mylenium.

Well - that's what would have come to my mind too IF it wouldn't have worked before.
I had other scenes (that is: same setup, different text, different camera, same font) that worked like a charm. Now, "all of a sudden", the newer ones screw up while the old ones still work fine.

I'll try some different setups, so far I suspect this to be some sort of bug within mograph/the cache tag.

[Mylenium]

Thanks Mylenium.

Well - that's what would have come to my mind too IF it wouldn't have worked before.
I had other scenes (that is: same setup, different text, different camera, same font) that worked like a charm. Now, "all of a sudden", the newer ones screw up while the old ones still work fine.

I'll try some different setups, so far I suspect this to be some sort of bug within mograph/the cache tag.

Perhaps in your other files you are only using standard fonts so the problem never showed up before?

Mylenium

[maximee]

Nope. Same font.

I still have no clue at all why this is the way it is.
Again: other scenes with the same setup/same font did and still do render fine.
But: making the textobjects editable (converting them to splines) works.

This all leaves me very unsatisfied but at least I can move on.
Thanks for your efforts! :)

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