What licenses are needed to setup a render farm

[colour]

Hi. Please excuse this simple question, but all the documentation I've sifted through, doesn't seem to explain it simply enough.

If we intend to have 5 licenses of Maya, a full copy of V-Ray for each Maya (so five copies), and then about 25 extra V-Ray render licenses. What is the requirement in software? Does Maya need to be installed on the other 25 machines? If so, is a trial version (that will not be opened for use) sufficient, or do more licenses of Maya have to be installed? Or is there a best practice more efficient way to set up the network for distributed rendering? And would the total amount of machines we could render on then be 30? Also, can the V-Ray render licenses receive renders from 3ds Max as well as Maya?

Thanks!

[yolov]

You don't need to have Maya installed on machines that you want to use as render nodes only. The only thing you need is V-Ray standalone - it can pick up a Distributed Rendering job for both production rendering and IPR rendering, or it can be used with render managers for network rendering. It only requires a Render Node license which is a universal license and can be used for 3dsMax render jobs as well as any other V-Ray product. I don't think there's a limit to the number of machines that you can use.

It is quite common to use your 5 Maya machines for rendering whenever they're not used by the artists, so that shouldn't be a problem and it will only depend on your own setup and the network rendering tools that you use.

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Ok great, thanks for the reply.

If we don't want to do distributed rendering from V_Ray command line, would we need to use a 3rd party render manager such as Deadline to simply manage our render queues or could we still use backburner to manage jobs even though we don't have maya on all the render machines? I assume we'd still need to install used plugins on all render machines too, or would that not be necessary (Such as Phoenix FD, Fume or Ornatrix)?

[FSGFX]

if you like to use maya batch with Deadline you need to install maya on all nodes... but without a license... you dont need to open maya...
and you dont need a key to install it since maya 2017... maya batch does not need a maya license...

[yolov]

Using deadline, maya batch with custom scripts, backburner or any other solution is entirely up to you and each solution comes with its own requirements. If a machine is used to render with V-Ray, then it will require a render node license, that's the only requirement in terms of licensing. In terms of software - yes, you would need to have all plugins on all machines.

[colour]

Thanks. That clarifies the process for me