Troubleshooting

If you’re stuck and not able to render successfully with Muster, please take a look at the following common issues. If this doesn’t help, take a look at the Virtual Vertex forum or drop a line to [email protected]

• Red dot under J or T column: The job failed. When it encounters a critical error Muster prevents further processing and puts the job in the client exclusion list (job based or template based depending on the error). The behavior is normal and avoids an endless loop in the farm. You can fine tune the sensitivity of the system in the Dispatcher preferences. I.e. a warning in the log may be normal and you may not want to lock the render for a warning, so just disable it in the Dispatcher preferences

• Input/output error or scene loading error (Exit code 211 on Maya): This is the most common issue. Muster as explained, runs as a service. If you didn’t assign an user to the service or the user has not enough privileges to access the network shares, your render will stop with a file read error. This may also happen when your file repository has not enough client access licenses (i.e. Windows XP with more than 5 hosts)

• Objects are black and/or textures are missing: You’ve linked your textures in a relative way on your local host. The slaves on the network don’t have the same texture on their locate drive and are not able to read the data. Move your textures on the network and/or re link them on the shader

• Jobs are not starting: Your Dispatcher selection engine may be stopped. Check that the blue bar is moving. Check also that the engine you’re using is actually supported by the idle hosts (right click and selected supported templates), that you’re not targeting a pool with busy hosts and that you’ve not configured limits on the users preferences (templates and pools limits)

• Jobs are never completed, chunks are always re queued after a certain amount of time: Muster has a global timeout value for the chunks. If your job is so slow to render you may hit the global timeout and never get it completed. Just tune the global packets timeout in the Dispatcher preferences, or override the timeout in the job’s properties

• Muster complains about a missing executable: During the setup phase, Muster may fail to detect installed packages, you may need to manually configure each client with the correct paths to the render engines

• Muster complains about a missing license: Certain packages requires at least a batch render license. Check that you own such license and you’ve configured each node in the way described in the software producer manual