Getting in to Standalone - Deadline/Linux/AWS

[thomas_bussey]

New years resolution - learn how to use standalone and combine it with Deadline/AWS

I've started using deadline recently, and looking in to how I can use AWS farm capabilities. In a basic sense it seems fine in theory: buy 3DSmax and Vray licence time, choose your instances and fire them all up through the AWS portal.

What I've read though is that the most cost effective way of doing things is to render with standalone on a Linux render farm, as these instances are much cheaper to run - no 3DSmax licence time either.

So firstly a basic question - the 'render node' licence in my Vray 5 licence server is valid for standalone (and all other platforms), correct?

Secondly, regarding rendering across different OSs, as I understand it Linux does not like spaces or special characters, so the file-paths can be remapped using Deadline I think? Presumably there is no need to rename all my assets so that Linux can handle them, or is there?

I understand there is much to learn here, and I might be better off just practicing rendering on AWS with Windows instances, but my curiosity is now piqued and I'd like to learn about this usage. From what I've read there is a string argument for running even a local render farm on Linux.

Lastly, are 3rd party plugins such as ForestPack and Railclone required to be installed on the machine rendering with standalone, or are all the scattered items just converted to instances as they would be at render time? I would assume there would be an issue with special maps such as forest colour.

I appreciate any knowledge or tips that can be shared before I get in to what could be a world of pain and confusion.

[nikolay.simeonov]

Hi Thomas,

You are correct - your V-Ray 5 'render node' license is compatible with V-Ray Standalone. V-Ray Standalone requires only a render node license to be used. The render node license is the same across all platforms.

I believe there are ways to remap files via Deadline but I am not entirely sure, in theory Linux should be able to obtain the files even if they have spaces/special characters.

V-Ray Standalone can render only a .vrscene files. The ForestPack/Railclone instances will be converted by the V-Ray scene exporter and should be rendered via standalone afterwards.