Need advice about Xeon render blade please

#21

This is all stuff you can find on AD’s website, or from your reseller.
From their doco for 2013 (and AFAIK it hasn’t changed for 2014) assuming you mean MRay:

Network rendering using the render command line utility
Each Maya license allows you to render in Maya interactively on one machine and run batch rendering on five machines. You can therefore perform mental ray for Maya rendering on up to 6 machines.

Other engines will be a different deal, and how maya seats are used is up to how things are set-up over there.

#22

Thanks Jaco. I guess the 5 batch machine also applies to Vray. 1 Vray every 10 nodes, 1 Maya every 5 nodes. Doesn’t sound too bad.

Including the software price, building 16x3930k actually comes really close to an 8 blade twin Xeon 2660. Now it’s just a matter of space I guess :open_mouth: I have this impression that Xeon will probably have longer life-span than I7 with more endurance, we might go that route for longevity.

#23

how does the batch vray licensing work anyway?

It still needs maya to be installed in some form right?

I’m just trying to figure out if you want say 20 render nodes and have 2 vray batch licenses so you can render on 20 computers, do you need 4 maya batch licences still, or can you render on all 20 machines with 2 vray licenses with just 1 maya batch license?

Do you need to pay for a full suite of maya batch licenses regardless of rendering engine?

#24

That’s my guess. 4 Maya license and 2 Vray license for 20 nodes (plus their workstations counter part.) We might already have that covered, I don’t think we’re using any batch license right now.

#25

damn, that was the major reason I was considering vray - i thought Vray render licenses would be cheaper than having to pay such a high premium to get more maya MR licenses.

I guess we’re screwed paying for multiple maya batch renderers either way.

#26

When you render on a farm (I don’t know vray in the specific) you usually do so with interim files and referencing correlated to the rendering engine.
ASS for Arnold, RIB for RMan engines, mi for MRay and so on.2

If VRay has a container file, you don’t need batch seats for anything other than generating them. If it doesn’t, well kinda sucks.

@Panupat
Consider depleting your license pool. That might mean 6 dual Xeons and 6 single CPU units (for the sake of example) will already be covered, and, assuming they will cost the same, will give you a better coverage of single CPU tasks (again, assuming you have any).
Just some food for thought.

Also, check that licensing isn’t per CPU with whatever secondary software you use, because in that case the 8 xeons will still count as 16 nodes.

#27

V-Ray can render from an archive (similar to RIB, IFD, MI, etc.). The archive for V-Ray is called vrscene and the officially supported applications like Maya can export them. This means you don’t need a Maya license for every render node but keep in mind it will take time to export the vrscene prior to the render instead of just submitting the Maya scene file to the render farm. Additional V-Ray licenses can be purchased for rendering, they’re something like $100 each if you buy a lot of them at once (20+), or if you buy just one or two they are like $500 each. When purchased in bulk they’re a pretty good deal.

#28

Great information, thanks for sharing. Still have to discuss with the pipeline team if we can come up with vrscene workflow.

Btw, one of the resellers confirmed to me that Vray has no CPU limit per node :beer:

We are checking the price and get back to you soon.  List price is around
US$1400.00 per license with USB dongle.
The connection is ONE Master can link with 10-slave to do rendering, there
are totally 11 nodes.  No. of CPU does not be limited per computer.

That’s from Hongkong resellers… even just 1 license, the price + plane ticket is still cheaper than buying from Thai reseller locally. I might just do that.

#29

There you go, problem solved :slight_smile:

And yes, you might pay an overhead in time taken to write and read and transfer those files, and one in online storage for the life of the rendering files (and if you’re smart and have a decent load balancing you’ll pay the price for those files to be distributed to the blades too), but except for very rare cases (client and engine have truly aligned scene data, which I doubt is the case for maya and VRay) you normally get your money back in ease of management, peace of mind, lower memory footprint, and of course one less licensing headache.

#30

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