Part of my job is maintaining our renderfarm. We make Artists Impressions (ArchViz) and we have an entire server room with about 50 computers calculating our images (rendering the 3d files to beautiful art). And then there's the 30 odd workstations that are also part of the renderfarm when they're not being used.

I would love to say if it ain't broke don't fix it.

So as I've posted yesterday, I am at work while the rest of my coworkers are on vacation. A perfect opportunity for me to update our renderfarm software without 'people' breathing down my proverbial neck when the update throws a monkeywrench in our Production Pipeline. Boy let me tell you ... lot's of simians doing epic wrench throwing today. I've been postponing updating it, because of above potential reason, but since our software (3ds Max) has already progressed 3 versions since I last updated the renderfarm software, I had to update to make use of new features) so unfortunately, it was time to let the wisdom of not fixing if it isn't broken go.

So far so good

So, this morning after making sure there were no active renderjobs, I backupped the Renderfarm Software and proceeded to deploy the update. To my amazement, that part went without a hitch. The server installed the new update, and through the server deployed it to all the clients (renderfarm & workstations) all was well in the garden of Eden.

SSDD

But then I went on to test is with our custom submit script. It's a piece of programming in maxscript that basically tells a machine to render the file you're submitting with this and those settings bla bla bla ... EPIC FAIL !!! (see my face above, that's how I Felt.)

Nothing happened ... apparently, the update to the renderfarm software had changes that affected what I threw at it through our script. Ffs ... this was NOT in the plans for today. It was supposed to go without any hick-up ...

Well, luckily we had some error logging build into our script so I had at least some inclination of where to look, but it still took the better part of 2 hours to find the culprit. Apparently, the company making our rendermanagement software decided to 'fix' something by making it adhere to some stricter rules for file and output paths.

It all came down to a single backslash \ in the code that the software regarded as an 'escape' for the last quotes to close the pathstring ... FML. (little funfact, I had to use 2 ! backslashes in above code to display it. else it would've escaped the < code > markdown LOL

well, I'm glad I managed to fix it before the herd comes storming back in on monday brandishing Torches & Pitchforks.