CompuServe Messages

We're having problems with several aspects of rendering over the network producing different (in some cases, WILDLY different) results vs. rendering locally. For instance, I have a wireframe material set to Units applied to a certain object. The units setting is wide enough that the object appears to be made of beams, not wires. When rendered locally, it comes out fine. When rendered via Net Queue, it acts as if it were set to 1 Pixel instead of my Units setting — the object looks like it's made of fine wires that don't recede in thickness according to perspective — just what one would expect from Pixels Wire vs. Units Wire. I checked both the .MLI and the mesh versions of the material (using Get from Library and Get From Scene) and they are identical, both set to Units Wire. Also, NEW-SUBTRACTIVE-TRANSPARENCY settings are not transmitted, so that all network render farm machines have to have their 3DS.SET files edited and then exit and restart 3DS just to set the transparency type. No fun. SMOKE.SXP doesn't seem to hold its settings when rendered via Net Queue, despite SMOKE.SXP (and all IPASes) being copied to each machine's local 3DS3\PROCESS (and 3DS3\MAPS in the case of SXPs) directories, with Read Only attribute set just in case. More seriously, 3DSr3 appears to open its bitmap files with Full Access instead of Read-Only Access, even when rendering on a network. This causes machines to fail unless I remember to do "ATTRIB +R" on every single bitmap image used in the animation. Failure to do so causes one machine to start rendering and all others to fail at the "Readying Materials" stage with a "File Access Denied" error in the Net Queue Error Log. Clean-and-Update then causes another machine to succeed and all others remaining to fail, and so on — the process either has to be repeated for each machine on the network, or else I have to stop, do "ATTRIB +R *.*" on every directory in the Map Paths being used for this animation, and restart. Yes, SHARE.EXE is loaded on all machines: servers, workstations, and render farm beasts of burden. So what gives here? Surely you didn't release a major network program that isn't smart enough to open files as Shared Read-Only Access unless it really needs full write access (like when saving a file)!