Purchasing V-Ray licenses for 3rd party render farm (Qube)

[sjo76]

I work for a college where I manage a 20 worker Qube render farm. I want to get some V-Ray 2 licenses for both 3ds Max and Maya to provide the users with the ability to render using V-Ray. However, I am a little unclear on how licensing is handled in a render farm scenario especially when it is using a 3rd party render farm Qube rather than the V-Ray DR. Also how many licenses would I need for such a scenario?

Any help is welcome

[joconnell]

None at all. the very kind people of chaos group have stuck with the max ideal that you buy one interactive license to change parameters and set up your scenes, but then you can network render on as many machines as you like. There might be a limit but it's about 10,000. Each single vray for max license also lets you use distributed rendering on 10 computers, and you can join licenses on the same dongle to allow more machines than 10 at one time. You'll probably need to buy extra licenses for the qube software for each machine you run that on, but vray for max is pretty much free.

[Da_elf]

doesnt windows have a connection limit?

[joconnell]

That's very true - it used to be 10 machines for a workstation license of 2000 / nt, not sure what it is on win 7.

[Da_elf]

i think people were getting the same 10 connections on XP

[Zach Gray]

I've written a simplecmd template for qube for .vrscene files. I'll post it if you want it. You can submit using the maya render, which calls vray, but I wanted less overhead so our pipeline renders .vrscenes directly.

I've also modified the qube maya submission script to be able to submit .vrscenes directly from maya to qube.

In terms of licensing, 10 to 1 seems correct for the ratio between interactive/render licenses. However, vray seems to be licensed per node, not per thread. We have some blades with 12 processors and a bunch of ram, and even though we run 4 frames at once, it only checks out a single license.