Tried to find this in the vray for houdini docs but no luck so far. My question is, in vray for houdini what do we need to have in our renderfarm? Only a vray render node license is required? Or also a houdini engine for each render node?
As far as rendering VRScenes is concerned, you’d be good to go with Render Node licenses only. V-Ray certainly does not require a Houdini engine license. A Houdini license itself is also not needed if you’re sending the scenes from the command line rather than the Houdini GUI.
There’s also the distributed rendering option on the V-Ray ROP itself. It also only requires V-Ray Render Node licenses on the slave machines - a Houdini license for the slaves is not required.
We ship a vray.bat with the V-Ray for Houdini archive - copying the archive contents on the slave machines and calling the bat file in the command line as “./vray.bat -server” should be enough. Note that the vray.bat file is looking for some QT libraries in the Houdini install folder, though. I was told by @bdancer that this can be worked around on Linux, unfortunately I don’t know if that is the case on Windows.
If you have V-Ray for Maya or Standalone already set up on the farm, that should work straight away.
Hope that helps!
Everything depends on how you want to organize your farm.
If you want to render through V-Ray DR you’ll need only V-Ray Render node.
If you want to render exported *.vrscene files you’ll need only V-Ray Render node.
If you want to render though *.hip files then you’ll need V-Ray Render node as well as a valid Houdini setup.
Appreciate the responses! Are there any tutorials or walkthroughs to rendering a houdini scene via .vrscene and via command line? Ideally with Deadline and/or HQueue
Currently not. We’ll prepare something ASAP and ping you.
Cheers!
Appreciate it! Several people i know have the same doubts and would like a simple walkthrough, hopefully it will clear things up. Thank you
Hi again, any update on this?
Hey, got distracted with other things and postponed the tutorials. Please excuse me for the delay 
I have one prepared for HQueue and will write up something on using V-Ray for Houdini as Standalone later today - that should be fairly short. We should make those two public by the end of tomorrow.
I’ve also got a Deadline setup so documenting this shouldn’t take too long. I’ll add a Deadline walk-through on the docs next week.
All the best!
Thanks for the quick update!
Hey,
I’ve published the HQueue guide here: V-Ray for Houdini
You will only need the “Setting up the V-Ray Renderer ROP for HQueue” section if you already have a working HQueue setup.
Please excuse me if there are any typos. I published the page straight away so you guys are not further delayed. The Documentation team will hopefully have time to review it in the next few days for errors I’ve missed.
All the best!
Hey,
here’s the other guide on using the vray.exe file as standalone.
Please ping me if there’s anything I should add.
All the best!
So far so good, it helps a lot, thanks! Any ETA on the Deadline one? We don’t use HQueue, only deadline so for us right now that’s the most useful one.
In addition you want to make sure that you use the standalone that comes with vfh. easiest here is to deploy it on a server and use a preload python script in deadline to set all the variables.
^ yup, that is basically my setup and what I plan on writing a short guide on.
Any ETA on the Deadline one?
Unless nothing urgent pops up, I hope to publish it tomorrow.
I’ve tried the deadline one as psanitra said, and its working. However, on a very simple scene with an HDRI, ground plane and the test geometry crag, the workflow is very primitive and non efficient. If i want to render 100 frames, it has to calculate locally on my machine a vrscene with 100 frames with only those objects, and it takes about 1.5GB in file size. Now, when i send this to the network, each machine will have to read the same 1.5GB file to start a single frame, and right now its taking 2min to read it and 10secs to render… So i tried adding $F and it’s quite more manageable now!
Question is, how about bigger files? With hundreds of objects, and even simulations?? Let’s say i have a flip fluid with a cache per frame of about 500mb (which is quite often). Does the vrscene reference the cache, or does it include the 500mb cache in the vrscene file?
Or let’s say a cartoonish animation, with hundreds of characters, alembic files, environment, textures, etc. Does the vrscene reference the textures / alembics / caches? Or include everything in the vrscene?
Is there something like the delayed load feature in Mantra for vray?
Sorry if these questions seem primitive or dumb, but right now we’re evaluating if it’s worth it to assemble and render everything in houdini instead of 3dsmax. In max it’s quite simple and straight forward, let’s hope we can have something close to that in houdini
Alembic files, textures, VRScenes (imported using the VRScene SOP), V-Ray Proxies, Volumes are referenced from the files on disk, as long as you are not modifying the topology or voxel information (for volumes). You can transform alembics and volumes without breaking the referencing.
Importing obj, bgeo, FBX, etc. (ie. actual geometry) will bake the mesh info into the VRScene. The same goes for rendering live volumes or modifying a volume cached to disk (e.g. with a Volume Wrangle) and hitting render. COP images are also baked into the VRScene.
Hope that helps!
Helps indeed, i did a few tests and so far it references everything correctly as long as it’s properly cached. Is there any option to calculate the vrscene in the farm via deadline? Like the ifds from mantra
If this ( https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/products/deadline/10.0/1\_User%20Manual/manual/app-houdini.html#renderman-exporting-and-renderman-standalone ) is what you are referring to - no, unfortunately for the time being there is no way to do this, as far as I can tell. I believe Thinkbox should add this option on their end.
The closest you can get to this is using the Deadline ROP to submit the hip file. Once that’s done, Deadline will launch the hip file with hython and render the V-Ray Renderer ROP. For this to work, the environment variables specifying where V-Ray is located need to be provided in the //Repository\plugins\Houdini\JobPreLoad.py file. I’m currently adding this as a short guide in the docs section.
Hey @Moriah , I’ll publish a guide today; delayed it yesterday because I had trouble loading V-Ray from a network location and I wanted to figure out what’s causing it before publishing information that may not work.
Cheers!