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Centralized Asset Management
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Usinganima® (PRO and ALL) you can download the models from the library directly from inside the anima® application. If you are going to use anima® on multiple machines connected to the same network, we recommend setting up your “Purchases” folder in a shared location to make sure that all the machines are using the same updated resources.
Sharing the downloaded models in the same network location is a good idea to use it as a sort of download cache, to avoid downloading multiple times the same models. You are not forced to do it because anima® will automatically download any of the assets you may need, but sharing the same Purchases folder with your colleagues will save you time and bandwidth (keep in mind that the new 4D models have a considerable size).
However, the Render Node installations of anima® don’t need access to the “Purchases” folder, only to the anima® project folder, because all the resources used in a project are stored inside the subfolder named “resource cache”, placed inside each project folder. We use that “resource cache” subfolder to store all the resources used by that particular project in the most efficient way. This way, we ensure that any device having access to the anima® project folder will be able to load and render the scene without issues, and you won’t need to manage the contents of the “Purchases” folder manually.
Therefore, as you do when you render with any other DCC application like 3dsMax®, Maya®, or Cinema4D® either either locally or using a Render Manager like Backburner, Pulze, Batch Render, Team Render or Deadline, your only need to put your anima® project folder in a shared network and then import it into your scene. After that, the anima® plugin will be able to find and load that scene from your local network (ALL, PRO and Render Node), and will render the anima® content without issues.
The Purchases Folder
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Then you can configure your anima® preferences to set the “Purchases” folder on another network path, in order to share your purchased assets with all the other machines.
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Blocked Purchase Folder
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Notice that when the alive™ connection is active, the “Purchases” path is blocked on the preferences dialog. We added this limitation when we introduced alive™ to avoid library inconsistencies between the plugins and the core anima® application during the synchronization updates.
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Learn more about this in the following article: Understanding the Resource Cache. |
Invisible Mapped Drives
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If you have problems to have access to your mapped drives from anima®, it means that the main anima® process “anima.exe” is running in a user environment that does not have those mapped drives mounted yet or in which the access to those drives has been marked as unavailable by Windows (this could happen if the NAS or Server that hosts the network drives was not reachable for a while).
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- Make sure that the user that is running the anima® process has actually access to those drives and that the drive mapping is also set up on that account. You can see the users related to each process in the Windows Task Manager, at the Details Tab.
- Use the extended UNC paths instead of the mapped drives. For example, let’s say that the path “Z:\ANIMA_Assets” has a “Z:” mapped drive that corresponds to the UNC path “\\You_server\your_shared_folder“. Then you can replace that part to get the full path: “\\You_server\your_shared_folder\ANIMA_Assets”