V-Ray and render queue in Maya

[Adam_ace]

Hi,

Does V-Ray have a function to create a queue of maya files to render one by one (Maya 2016, 2016.5 and 2017)? Sort of like Cinema 4D have.

Also an additional question:

We consider getting a V-Ray with some V-ray nodes. How rendering would be done in that case.

A) Would full V-Ray license render a scene and use power of other PC on a network that have access to V-ray node?
or
B) Would each license (full or node) render a single maya scene?
or
C) It works different than the above options.

Thanks

[yolov]

There are different ways of doing that - one is DR (Distributed Rendering) which is V-Ray-specific, and the other is to use a render manager (like backburner, deadline or other).
Maya comes with backburner - you can use it to queue scenes and you can tell it how many machines to use. This is somewhat similar to what deadline does in the sense that it's a render manager, i.e. you can queue up scenes, set up the way they will be distributed through a number of machines so that machines 1-5 will render scenes 1-5 and machines 6-10 will render scenes 6-10. Or you can have one single scene and tell the manager that you want machines 1-5 to render frames 1-5 from that scene and so on (or any combination of the above). In that sense, V-Ray will support whatever way of managing the renders there are available for Maya.

The V-Ray-specific approach is somewhat different - it distributes the current render (or current frame) among a number of machines, so that it completes faster (but it's not a "manager").

The third option is to write a script yourself that generates a queue (that can be done using bash on linux or bat files on windows) but then again - that's what managers like deadline and backburner save you the trouble of going through.

In all cases, whether you'll use a render manager, or V-Ray's DR system and you want more than one machine to perform the rendering - you'll need a render node license for each machine. The license is needed, so that the machine can use V-Ray for rendering. The way you're using it (either for DR or for deadline or backburner) won't really matter.