Nparticles PROBLEM - won't find my cached particles on renderfarm server

[emblitz]

Hi!,

Im close to my wits end now. I've uploaded my entire project and all the nparticle cache files to 2 separate online render farms now and im constantly running into the same issue - my nparticle cache files/directories are not found.

Im using 64 bit version of maya 2010.

This is what i've done so far to troubleshoot:

-made sure the directory structure on the renderfarm server matches mine
-made sure that the base directory for each particle cache is relatative & not hard coded to a drive (so instead of D:\project001\data\FinalCombo_64bit3a i have \data\FinalCombo_64bit3a set as the base directory). My scene file is located in the projects001 directory on the renderfarms server.
- deleted any nparticles in my scene that are not required - i only have the neccessary nparticles and the related caches referenced in my scene 
- optimized my scene and deleted all "history" on all elements

..and its still not finding my nparticle caches when i anylize the scene file on their system. I've done a test render and the nparticles in my scene just gather in one location of the frame and aren't rendered in the postions that they are supposed to - so to me this says that the cache files are not being referenced. I also have regular dynamic cached particles in the same scene and those render properly - so whats up?? i cannot for the life of me figure out what is going on here.

The render farm tech support can't either. We've attempted to change the base directory for each of my nparticle caches (i have 5) to reference the exactly location on their server, but this didnt work. Maya wont even let you do that.. looks like it only allows you to specify a directory that actually exists in relation to your base project directory.

SO...help? anyone....
Has anyone had any success rendering nparticles on a renderfarm recently?
And the funny part is i successfully had a version of this same project rendered out on a farm last year..i've not changed anything to these particular nparticles in the scene file or the caches since then...but this year it won't work. Neither on the same renderfarm, nor on a new company's render farm.... WTF?

ANY help at all or suggestion would be greatly appreciated. I only have 5 days left to figure this out.

Thanks! Em.

[joojaa]

Its impossible to debug your renderfarm wit this information alone. Lets hyst say that it works on my farm. But ill give you tip. go and see what the maya ascii file says about the location to verify. Then after that write a script that looks up that local path in maya to dump to disk see what the problem is per each renderfarm node.

Usually by this time you will have deduced that maya has the wrong project environment.