Setting up a Maya renderfarm with VRay and Deadline

#1

Hello, everyone,

I hope someone can help me with this…

I work at a facility that has been using 3DSMax with Backburner as the renderfarm manager for our network rendering needs for almost 8 years.

However, both Backburner AND 3DSMax have been letting us down over the past year, so, our team has been pondering about migrating to Maya + VRay and use Deadline as the render manager (Our renderfarm has 80 slaves)

The questions about this are as follows:

a)Do we have to purchase more Maya Licenses to install in the Renderfarm Slaves?
b)In case of using Mental Ray with Satellite, do we have to purchase additional Satellite Nodes?
c)Does anyone know of any issues about using Vray and Maya on a Renderfarm managed by Deadline?

That’s about it. Thanks in advance for your replies! Cheers!!!

#2

For a) and b) I would think so-but ask Autodesk they can probably package something up for you.

I’d look here for c) and everything else.

#3

Well couple things come to mind

  1. is max best suited for the work your are doing
  2. how hard would it be to switch to maya
  3. if your getting vray you don’t need more lics of maya you need more vray render nodes
  4. have you tested deadline with your it staff its takes some setup to get going
  5. how many render node will you have
  6. budget for render farm manager
    7 for mental ray i believe you do need to buy more lic of maya but i think u can jus get the MR lics to render but you need to call AD

Ive used qube and was quite nice ive tested smedge but can be a pain to set up. All boils down to money an time

i have a 5 comp setup here with maya vray. im jus a one man shop so i jus network render runs like a tank

Hope that helps

#4

you have to buy enough maya network render licenses to render anything from maya on that many machines EXCEPT for the legacy maya software renderer which supports 999 render machines I think.

Then you have to buy your vray licenses on top of that

#5

I might be wrong, but as far as I know, the “no license for render only” applies to any renderer that isn’t Mental Ray:

A. With regard to the Rendering Software (defined below), in addition to any other license granted in this Agreement, Licensee may allow the Rendering Software to be Installed or Accessed on a Networked Basis, solely for Licensee’s Internal Business Needs, specifically to render files created with the Software. However, if the Rendering Software is mental ray, and the Software is provided with a finite number of mental ray rendering nodes, then with regard to mental ray the foregoing is restricted to that number of mental ray rendering nodes

#6

Not for V-Ray, you don’t. You can just install V-Ray standalone on the slaves without installing Maya on them. You need licenses for the V-Ray slaves (loaded from the master with dongle) but you don’t need a license for Maya. Those V-Ray slaves will work with Maya or Max too. This is the setup I use at home:

Mac host with dongle/Maya/V-Ray
Linux Xeon server with V-Ray standalone and no Maya install
Windows gaming rig with V-Ray standalone and no Maya install

#7

nice, I didn’t know that.

I guess I must’ve assumed that since everyone was always saying MR was free to render with and Vray costs extra. I guess they were talking about a single license and not an actual render farm.

Just curious, on render nodes that don’t have maya installed, how are custom scripts and 3rd party plugins dealt with? Do people set up identical folder hierarchies to a maya install that are actually mounts to a server that does have the scripts and plugins? Does that work out ok?

#8

in that case, I’d just install Maya as a demo (or install with a serial on Linux and don’t activate) and install the full V-Ray for Maya package and plug-ins, just in case. You don’t need a license to use V-Ray as a slave but maybe it will call some shared library that might be missing so it’s best to be safe in that case.

#9

The Maya render command-line tool (and mayabatch) do not use Maya Batch licenses when you render scenes with a third-party renderer such as V-Ray or Arnold.