Small render farm - advise needed

[Daytona]

Hello,

I wish to set-up a small render farm (just a dozen of old servers/workstations) and would love to get some advise on hardware/software set-up.

95% of the time I use Max+Vray. I usually make high resolutions stills (something like 5000x4000 pixels ).
I would love to be able to commit those renders from my main workstation and just use the other computers in the network for the actual rendering.
My main concerns are:
1) how to find a cheep software solution (so getting this set-up with Linux would be a big plus) - any render managers being capable of working cross-platform would be a big plus. Obviously I can't afford to buy a separate 3ds Max and Vray license for each computer.
2) Does anyone have some experience with working with some additional plugins for Max/Vray like autograss, Multiscatter, Phoenix etc? Currently I do not use those, but would still love to be able to have a set-up that would allow me to use them without the need to buy a new license for each node.

So far I was looking at RenderPal and some other commercial solutions, but the per-node based pricing is putting me off a little bit.

Thanks.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

For managing render farm I would use ReFaMo - Cheap and it works... not sure if its cross platform but try !

Each plugin have few extra nodes usually... check their licensing info to find out...

[simmsimaging]

Every plug in will have its own licensing policy, but many allow you to use render nodes for free now (VrayScatter does, not sure about multi scatter etc).

For the first part of what you want to do though, I do this with Backburner and it works just fine. Vray will allow up to 10 render nodes per license. It's not too difficult to setup and it works great for me. Not sure if it can be done in Linux though, so if that's a deal breaker you'll need 3rd party software like Refamo or Deadline etc.

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[tammo]

As far as i know its not possible to render 3ds max jobs on linux.
You have to install max and vray on every node but both have free render node versions.
Your cheapest option would be to buy several standard PCs with windows 7 64 Bit, fast CPU and lots of RAM.
It makes sense to buy at least as much RAM as you have in your workstation.
If money is not important or you have to buy more then 10 nodes you can buy server hardware and put it into racks.
It saves space and is easier to manage and can deal better with 24/7 workloads.

[Daytona]

to be honest my impression was that you can't run Max directly on linux, but all of the commercial render managers like the Deadline suppose to run under linux. Not sure how, unless it's just inaccurate marketing on their side and only their render client works under linux, which makes the whole thing pointless since your app of choice does not work under linux.
Obviously running everything through backburner would require me to buy a windows license for each PC, which makes my whole cunning plan of buying refurbished servers on the cheap a bit less cunning. An old server/workstation (something like an dual CPU xeon + 2-4GB RAM) is still worth using in a render farm imho, but costs less than a new W7 license. So it makes sense only if I can use linux.

Thanks for all the answers.

[joconnell]

Yep the actual manager of deadline itself can be run on linux but you still need to use software to render with that can run on linux too. Pretty much every other big 3d and compositing package have a linux version (houdini, maya, xsi, nuke, renderman etc) but the only way of doing what you want would be to try something like vray standalone running on linux. Maybe see can you get cheap windows xp 64 licenses if they work out cheaper since 3dsmax will never run on anything other than windows. The base code is too heavily tied into windows unless they make a totally new version of the program and by the time that actually happens your render nodes are going to be obsolete anyway!

[Daytona]

well ... vray standalone isn't free I guess Having a full license of vray can we install the standalone version for linux as render nodes?
For DrQueue there is a possibility to render out Max/mental ray images, but again through standalone MR and shader libraries.

The last mention about drqueue and vray is from two years ago
https://ssl.drqueue.org/cwebsite/drq...scussionID=521