UAC problem (Windows 8) with Rebusfarm
The situation
Many of you may know Rebusfarm, the market leader of renderfarms. This weekend, we had a VRay animation to be done: full HD and with motionblur. You know what this means... rendertimes en masse!
Our hardware couldn't have handled that in this short amount of time and so a renderfarm had to be used.
What should I say... the software (Rebus Render Manager) is a nice thing. The plugin "Rebus Farminizer", which is integrated in 3D Studio Max, is also a great idea. It makes you feel like rendering directly on a serverfarm next door or in the cellar of your company. The money you spend rendering at Rebus is also fair enough. So much for the pros.
The problem
On the other hand I spent a whole Saturday morning until I got rid of an annoying error while using the "Smartcheck" feature of Rebus Farminizer (whose OK is needed to send a scene to the renderfarm). The message said I had to start 3D Studio Max with administrative rights to communicate with the Rebus Render Manager. "No problem!"... I thought. In fact it WAS a problem because it didn't work as expected. Running 3D Studio from my workstation's admin account didn't solve this error. My next try was to disable UAC, the User Account Control of Windows. There are tons of (video) tutorials that show you where to find these controls in Windows. After disabling it and rebooting, NOTHING had changed. The error was still there.
The solution
If you know what to do, it is a matter of seconds. You just have to completely disable UAC via Windows registry. For all those of you afraid to manually change something in the Windows registry, there are two files: one to disable UAC and one to enable UAC.
I hope this will help some 3D artists to prevent getting a headache while seeing the deadline running closer and closer towards you like I did.