Render unto Caesar

starboard

Waiting for renders (like water dripping on your forehead) has finally driven me to buying a new Imac (i7). The idea is to keep working in Carrara on one Mac while rendering on the other. The problem is when I transfer the Carrara icon of the scene I want to render to my new Imac (via a USB hard drive) it comes over whithout textures.  I have never thought of this before..but it makes sense, in that Carrara has to reference the texture maps which I originally supplied - for example the roofing tiles. But why does it not use its own textures : for example the trees, which are in its own library ? Instead I get a grey non-texture surface on all objects in the scene - fortunately the keyframes all came across.  Either way, the question is what is the best way to transfer my Carrara file over from my work Mac to my  "Render Mac" . At present I am making a folder with Carrara and all the texture maps within, then transfer the folder .. Is this the best procedure ? I don't want to use a Render Network as, from what I understand, this would keep both macs rendering. 

Thanks for any advice and guidance.

Philemo_Carrara

I did that, but on a Windows network, not OSX, so I don't know if it will transpose.

I shared the content folder across the lan. On each Carrara, I added a folder content via the network name of that shared folder. Doing that, both relative name and absolute name were the same for the two computers.

starboard

Thanks Philemo,

Once I put all the textures in the same folder and moved them to my second mac it worked fine. What is strange is that even the procedual textures come up now also - what a relief. I was wondering if I was going to have to link them all up again.

It has been a lesson on keeping my folders more up to date and to weed out what is not current.

Now back to happy rendering.   

TangoAlpha

Carrara writes the full path to the texture file in the .car file. It also writes a relative path (from the location of the .car file) for portability. It does assume that either the relative or absolute path is goint to be the same on both machines. Unfortunately, a bug in the Mac version under El Capitan means that if it can't find the texture when it loads, it neglects to tell you the name of the file it's missing. Which is annoying. 

The easiest option is to make sure the folder structure on your second Mac is identical to the first, and all your texture files are copied across (especially if you've borrowed textures from other projects).

The longer term option is to always make sure you copy the textures to an easy relative path (: or :Textures for example) before you use them. I always structure my projects

ProjectFolder
ProjectFolder/Textures

Then if I copy over ProjectFolder, I know it *should* work.

Trees, leaves etc, need to be "installed" on both systems - you'll need to find the Carrara app in Applications, click on Show Package Contents. Leaves go in MacOS/Data/Plants. Trees go in MacOS/Presets/Plants Only then will it find them.

starboard

Thanks Tango.

I  have brought some discipline to my folders. All the files are coming across fine. I went to your facebook page.. The poppy field and the rustic theater are really fine work...I like the strive for realism... The rustic theater is as close as I think it is possible to get...really nice.

 

TangoAlpha

Thanks msteaka, I've just bunged up a few more renders. It's stuck in QA limbo right now, waiting for a tester (guess it's a busy time of year!). Once QA get moving on it I'll start a thread.