A customer recently reported that random machines on the farm were reporting this error. They have custom shaders installed in a workgroup, and the workgroup lives on a network drive that is accessible to all machines on the farm.

So, what is this SPDL registry thing?

It’s a file named spdl.xsiindex, and it’s a cached index of all the shader spdl files. Softimage creates/updates this SPDL registry at startup (so you can delete it to force the recreation of a new file).

You can find the file in %XSI_USERHOME%\Application. Actually, the file is named “spdl.MACHINE.xsiindex”. We had to add the machine name to the file name to prevent issues with concurrent access. However, I would think that if you ran multiple instances of xsibatch on the one machine, you might still have problems.

There’s also a MTL2UA0150CWY.xsishaderdefcache file to deal with the new-fangled, non-SPDL shaders.