Vray Render Nodes?

Can someone help me understand Vray Render Nodes? I’ve been using vray for a while but somehow haven’t heard about vray nodes. From what I can tell, I allows you to access different networks to speed up rendering on your machine, but how do you practically use it? Also, would it typically be faster then using chaos cloud or how does that work?

Is it basically a simple, user friendly way to create your own “render farm”?

Hi, thanks for posting. The render node is the part that makes sure your rendering tasks are up and running. The interface part runs the user interface. You could have one user interface and a 100 render nodes. When you buy a subscription plan it includes a render node and a user interface. This is a bit out of my scope since I am not dealing with license or sales but I will inform my colleagues about your thread. You could also open a ticket on our support contact form.

Hello zach_ryder,
Our packages come with 1 GUI(Interface) license + 1 x V-Ray Render Node license. V-Ray Render Node is a Universal license used for rendering only. In case you decide to make a render farm, you will need to have the same amount of V-Ray Render Node licenses as the machines that will be involved in the Distributed Rendering process. For example, if you have 6 machines used to make Distributed Rendering, you will need to purchase 1 x Workstation + 5 additional V-Ray Render Node licenses,
so you could render on all 6 machines at the same time in Distributed Rendering. The method of DR is to submit a scene for rendering and send it to all of the machines you want and this way the scene will be rendered by a lot of machine power.
More information regarding Distributed Rendering is specific for every product, so please check and search for “Distributed Rendering” on our documentation web page below in order to find more specific information:

You might also try our Chaos Cloud rendering:

The Chaos Cloud rendering doesn’t require you to have additional machines and licenses, and the speed of rendering is really fast.

Also here, on our forum web page, you might search for Distributed Rendering and read more information.

Let me know if you have any specific questions and feel free to raise a ticket and ask there as well.
Thank you.

Thanks for the responses! And would this also allow you to render multiple scenes at the same time?

Also, does it support gpu renderings?

V-Ray Distributed Rendering is not a Render Manager application, and you can not render more than one job at a time. You can use different Render Manager applications in order to render and queue more than one job at a time. V-Ray DR supports GPU. Please check the links above for more information about all of our products and the methods of rendering. Thank you.

And does that mean that each computer has to have a vray “seat”. I’ve bought the initial render node and then I bought another one since I have 2 computers that I would like to use. Whenever I open vray swarm, it only shows 1 of the 2 computers even though I have vray downloaded on both, however, I only have one vray license. Since I only have one license (meaning I cannot use vray on both machines at the same time) does that mean I need to also buy another seat for my second computer on top of buying an extra vray node?

I’m also curious about this! I’m looking for additional render node licenses to be added to my vray license

I only need one seat since I have a workstation for working and one or 2 render stations for distributed rendering.

If I want to use this setup to do distributed rendering. Can I get a license setup that consists of One Vray Seat for my workstation and two additional render nodes licenses for my render stations?
Or do I need to purchase three whole entire Vray Seat licenses for the full price to be able to do distributed rendering in this setup?

Looking forward to a reply. Thanks in advance

I think it should be possible. Could you please submit a request at support.chaos.com

Best,
Muhammed

Just to add to Stefan’s point: if the goal is to render more than one job at a time, or to queue several jobs one after another, then DR is not really the right concept. DR helps multiple machines work on one render, while a render manager handles multiple render jobs.

For bigger/multi-machine setups, tools like Deadline, Backburner, Royal Render, etc. are usually the right category.

For a simpler local workflow, another option is to export the jobs as V-Ray scene files and queue those locally. That is more limited than a full render manager, but it can be enough if you just need one machine to process several V-Ray jobs overnight.

Disclosure: I’m the developer of V-Raykally, a small free app for that local exported V-Ray scene queue workflow.