Chaosgroup Suggested Workflow for Remote Rendering

[White Wizard]

I'm trying to figure out the best solution for my situation. I do all of my work within 3dsmax on my workstation, but due to covid my render slave machine will be located remotely for a large batch of renders I'm soon to be processing..

How can I successfully render on my render machine? Some more details and limitations:

The render machine will be physically accessible by my assistant, who can start renders and such but has limited technical abilities.
My scenes are very complex, utilizing Forest Pack pro and Growfx plugins but I do not have licenses for these on the render machine and I don't have an additional 3dsmax license for the render machine.
I would prefer to avoid direct connections between the machines for security reasons.

My theoretical workflow would involve sending .vrscene files via google drive to my assistant, who would load the .vrscene file into Vray standalone and simply render image sequences back to the cloud storage (we have plenty of cloud storage and my assistant will manage transfers).
Is this practical and what vray license would be required? If not, is there an officially suggested workflow for this type of remote rendering?

[Neilg]

You are placing a lot of restrictions on yourself. I would personally not be persuaded to ever work like that.

You can set max and forest/etc to pull licenses from another server via a direct VPN tunnel - you can also use this direct VPN to use windows remote desktop, which hopefully alleviate your security concerns as its happening via the tunnel you personally and temporarily opened. That way you can remote in, open the file, make sure everything is as it seems and queue a render up on backburner, taking back your max, vray & forest licenses when you disconnect.

[joconnell]

I've been using windows remote desktop and operating my work machine as if it's a local desktop - I'm not sure if your bandwidth in the office / at home will give you performance that's acceptable but it'd be worth trying!

We're using https://www.pulsesecure.net/ for our authentication, it's a combination of your usual login / password and a matching phone application to verify.

[White Wizard]

Besides the security concerns, the internet speeds at the render location are awful. Good enough for sending scenes over but image sequences would be impractical and so would any type of remote access. The workflow I imagined would consist of my assistant making proxies of the vray renders and eventually I would be sent a hard drive with the final sequences for comp.

[joconnell]

Hmm - worth your while looking at something like an online farm then? Pixelplow have been both fast and cheap for me and they've got all the plugin licenses covered. Are you working under mpaa rules in terms of your security concerns or some such?

[White Wizard]

No mpaa rules. I have sensitive data of employees and I try to keep my workstation as separated as I can from the web for that reason.

A VPN tunneling a backburner server from my workstation is the only viable option in this scenario?

[squintnic]

what you need is an online render farm - sounds like a VERY weird process to have a human at the other end manually sending renders lol....

[Neilg]

Having someone with 'limited technical abilities' be the one to submit renders, with you unable to check the sequence of frames until you get them posted to you on a harddrive sounds like a degree of pain in the ass that would make me find a new line of work. Trust me, it's going to be such a nightmare.
You will have problems, this is not a judgement on your abilities - everyone sends a render, sees it start, and then catches one stupid thing they forgot to click on - which they're able to fix very quickly and only lose about 20 minutes. You will lose, at best, about 3-4 hours? potentially multiple days. At least if you can VPN in you can catch that sort of thing yourself, you don't need a fast connection to click submit and make sure nothing is broken.

You can also get a ryzen rendernode which beats out the top of the line machines from 2-3 years ago for around $1400. How many render nodes are in this office? you make it sound like only one. If you can re-purpose cases, power etc and fold it in as a business expense which you get exclusive use of for a few months the cost becomes easier to justify. I guarantee you will lose $1400 worth of time and sanity.
If buying hardware is not an option, can you pick up that rendernode and borrow it to become your local rendernode?