Network rendering errors out the wazoo

#1

I’ve been using Backburner for years; never encountered these new problems until this morning.

Tried to submit a scene for rendering to my render-farm machine; ended up getting a message that said, “Error compressing job for submission”.
Looked it up on Google, and there were a few solutions that I tried, but none helped. There were also a few I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot cattle prod, like restoring my system from an image file. Not a chance I’m doing that.

One thing mentioned, though, was that the bitmaps used could be part of the problem, and unchecking ‘Include maps’ could make that compression issue just kind of go away.

…which it did. But, naturally, the produces another error: “Error using bitmap file” and then a path that went to “…\Documents\3dsMax\sceneassets\images”.
Can’t imagine why it’s trying to go there; I don’t have any images in the scene that are in that folder. I tried changing the path so that it went over the network, just in case my render-farm computer wasn’t seeing it, but that didn’t help at all.

I have no idea what’s going on. This is the first time I’ve seen any of this happen.
I mean, okay, I uninstalled a bunch of programs last night, but they were all games, and shouldn’t have affected MAX in any way.

Any idea what’s going on? Thanks.

#2

UPDATE: It seems to be just that one scene.

I’m gonna have to see whether there are any bitmaps in there with the same name as each other; saw that this could be a problem during my Google searchings.

But if not…no idea what’s going on.

Also tried the solution of importing all of the objects into an empty scene; didn’t work.

#3

Is the max file over 4gb in size? Backburner Zips up files to send to the render servers but zip files are 32bit and have a file size limit.

I had this issue a few years ago. Maybe its been fixed by now.

#4

Nope. It’s 130meg.

Also, sorry, I should have updated this yesterday after I found what I believe was the problem: two maps, same file name, totally different bitmaps in separate folders.

Started trying to isolate the problem by deleting objects from the scene and submitting it to network rendering until something worked. And, after seeing it on some of my searches for solutions, I checked the last object deleted and found that it was a character’s eyeballs, of all things.

These eyes were meant to be cartoon-ish, and I had used bitmaps of eyes instead of geometry…and the map had the same name as those of another character. Changed that and Bob was, indeed, my uncle.

Apparently, MAX has trouble when it tries to compress the scene if two bitmap files have the same filename. I mean, I guess it makes sense (though compressed files can have folder-trees, so maybe it doesn’t), but the error message could at least come with that explanation: “Filename ‘Bitmap-Q.jpg’ used twice; cannot compress scene” or something.

Ah, well…at least it’s sorted. Thanks.