Available Render Node Licenses

[mtp_thomas]

Hi,

I´m in the process of switching from Maya Mental Ray to Blender V-Ray (on a Mac). I use Pipeline to split my 3d scenes and render them on my render nodes. I´ve already written an addon to export Blender/Cycles scenes to Pipeline. I´ll do the same for V-Ray/Blender but I need an info prior to that:
The chaosgroup website states that V-Ray comes with 10 free render nodes (when using Maya Batch). But how is this working with V-Ray Standalone licenses? For example: is it possible to split a 100 frame animation into 10 render jobs (tasks) and let each task render on 10 different machines using command line (or better Pipeline)? So 10 machines are rendering at the same time.

Please note that I´m not talking about distributed rendering.

Before buying V-Ray I´d like to clarify this.
Would someone help me with this?

Regards, Thomas

[bdancer]

Re: Available Render Node Licenses

Hi!
V-Ray Standalone is a render node itself, so I think you will need some license pack like here: http://www.evermotion.org/modelshop/sho ... e/2703/0/0
Anyway you could contact ChaosGroup support for more info: support@chaosgroup.com.

[mtp_thomas]

Re: Available Render Node Licenses

Thanks for your reply bdancer. I just tried to avoid to bother chaosgroup with this request because I thought someone in this forum might have some experience to share. I´ll contact chaosgroup directly and post the answer here.

By the way: thanks for making V-Ray/Blender!!! Only because of your work I started to consider a switch from Maya to Blender/ V-Ray. I´m a coder myself (partially) and really appreciate your tremendous work which you share for free! The makers of Blender and you really inspired me to think different. As a result I made my commercial app ClipExporter available for free and open source. Thanks for your inspiration and best wishes for your new job at Chaosgroup!

Thomas

[bdancer]

Re: Available Render Node Licenses

Thanks, very pleased to read this =)

[mtp_thomas]

Re: Available Render Node Licenses

Reply from Chaosgroup:

V-Ray/Blender at this moment is an exporter to vrscene file format which can be rendered with V-Ray Standalone.
With one V-Ray Standalone license you can render on one machine so you can't render on 5 machines with one license.
One V-Ray 2.0 for Maya comes with 10 Standalone licenses which can be used for Mayabatch and with V-Ray Standalone. This means you can render on 10 machines with V-Ray Standalone.

[arquitecto]

Re: Available Render Node Licenses

Hi,
I hope i am not late on the conversation.
I have just read your post.
Thanks for the info!
I was considering a similar hardware setup to this one with blender http://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/08/09/ ... nder-farm/

Can you share your hardware and software for vrayblender ?
Thanks in advance.

[mtp_thomas]

Re: Available Render Node Licenses

arquitecto, my setup is this:

Hardware
- 1 MacPro (200, OS X 10.8.4
- 3 Hackinthosh Render Nodes. Intel i7-3770 (I use the built-in HD4000 graphics card), 16GB Ram, Mac OS X 10.8.0

Software
Currently I still use Maya. My workflow is Final Cut Pro X -> ClipExporter to export video clips. Mainly I do live footage integration in 3D scenes (see example here, my first music video back in 2009. Or this archvis project where 3d was integrated into photos and videos - the quality is bad because it is ripped from a a dvd). From here I do 3d camera tracking in Syntheyes or (depending on the project) go directly to After Effects. I create 3D scenes in Maya and send the finished scene to Pipeline, which distributes the render tasks to my render nodes. The finished renders will be post-processed in AE and exported back to FCP-X.

As already said, I´m currently switching to Blender. I´m not sure if I wait with the purchase of V-Ray because Chaosgroup announced version 3. I don´t want to buy now and pay an upgrade fee 2 months later. I´ll keep Maya as a "backup", therefore I decided to buy a V-Ray for Maya license which is 100 Eur more as a 10 Standalone Pack. This way I have V-Ray for Blender and Maya. But I´m a bit insecure because bdancer now works at Chaosgroup and my intuition tells me that they are working on a new integration of V-Ray in Blender. So I assume there´s a "V-Ray for Blender" coming with version 3.

I read the article on cgcookie. I´m not going to use this workflow. I think Pipeline is the best and easiest way to manage your renderings if you´re on a Mac (see this video). I wrote an exporter addon to export Blender scenes to Pipeline which is already working with Blenders built-in renderers. I´m still working on it and I´m almost done with the V-Ray support. This way I have one render manager to distribute render-jobs coming from Maya, Blender, AE, Nuke (also Modo, Cinema4D and a lot more).

My recommendation is: no matter if you have additional render-nodes or not, get Pipeline, it makes your workflow extremely efficient. And the best part is: it is free! My Blender to Pipeline addon will be included with the next update of Pipeline.

Hope that answers your question.
Thomas

[ArnaudT]

Re: Available Render Node Licenses

"I´m not sure if I wait with the purchase of V-Ray because Chaosgroup announced version 3"


I don't know if V-ray/Blender will support V-ray 3.0... Or maybe there will be two custom build ?

[arquitecto]

Re: Available Render Node Licenses

Hi mtp_thomas,

Thank you very much for your kind and detailled explanation.
Congrats for your excelent work!
You rock it very hard!

I must study the pipeline option. seems interesting.

it would be great to hear bdancer about the vray 3.0 option...
Common...Can you unveil a few information? None is hearing...
Anyway, Andrey's work will always be a gift for all of us...

[bdancer]

Re: Available Render Node Licenses

V-Ray 3.0 will work fine with the current exporter, may be just a few things to add.

[arquitecto]

Re: Available Render Node Licenses


yahooo!