Small Render Farm

[giraffe]

Thank you guys - this is very helpful info for me

[jacksc02]

My renderfarm (12 machines + workstations) is setup without monitors/keyboards. I do all the admin using VNC (free!). I also use Vsai's VRay Slave tools (do a search on this forum) for managing the various servers, rebooting, etc.

Then, I have Samurize setup to display CPU/RAM usage for every machine on the farm on my workstation's desktop background, so a quick glance will tell me what's going on in the farm. Then I launch VSai's tools to manage things, launch the monitor if necessary, and on the rare occaisions, use the tools to launch VNC to give me desktop access to each individual machine.

Dont you mean Daves slave tools?

Or are there different ones?

[pixelstudio]

Hey there people, just wanna jump into here.

I'm working in avery large firm, wich loads of computers.
our 3D department has about 20 pc, with 3dsmax/vray

Now i was thinking can we use the other PC in the network? or to be more exact use the processing power of those machines.
when we want this is it nessesary to install max/vray on every pc to take advantage of the processors (meaning we have to buy more licenses) ? or is there a program/service that runs and connect to a render server?
I have no experience with render farms. but this looks like the same thing.

With large render farms (over 200 pc's) do they all have a 3dsmax/vray with license running? that would be very expensive..

Hope you understand me

Cheers

[ruud3dv]

You need to install a slave/client version of max and vray, those versions won't need a license themselves.

One vray license will allow you to connect to 10 rendernodes, for every 10 more you need an additional vray license. For Max there's no such limit.

[claude_tnt]

One vray license will allow you to connect to 10 rendernodes, for every 10 more you need an additional vray license. For Max there's no such limit.

erm.. this might be misleading..... i think there is no limit for rendernodes.. just a limit for workstations i.e 1 workstation= 1 vray license

claude_

[joconnell]

True indeed - the 10 machine limit is for single frame dr, but for doing animations where there's one frame rendering per machine you can use as many as you want.