Mental ray render farm licencing questions

[mike_b]

Hi,
We are in the process of planning for a render farm for an upcoming project, and I really need some advice, if anyone is able to point me in the right direction.

We will have 80x single quad core motherboards in the farm, and I need to make sure that we have the best possible mental ray licensing configuration so that both the workstations and the render nodes will be covered.

We had previously considered a Softimage based pipeline, and recieved quotes for sufficient Ess and Adv licenes to ensure enough render tokens for the render farm. Since then, Soft was bought by Autodesk, and we have had to revise our options in the light of new software pricing options and a proposal to produce the project on Stereo 3d. This has led us to consider Maya as an alternative option.

We need to consider our best options now and part of our decision of which software route to take will be based on the impact of the render farm costs to our budget, which at this stage is pretty fixed.

In previous negotiations with Avid's XSI support, we were assured that we had enough Advanced licences to allow for sufficient render nodes, however Maya's satellite vs standalone licencing seems different, and Im beginning to suspect that and equivalent licencing cover would mean extra expense, particularly if we do need to purchase standalone licences.
I need to to get a clearer idea of what kind of additional mental ray licence is offered with Maya Complete and Unlimited, and with Softimage Advanced and Essentials and if they differ in any way.
From what I can gather, satellite rendering is not ideally recommended for a render farm. So we really need to know which system will give us the best and most economical options with the minimum impact on our budget.

For example, will we need to purchase any mental ray standalone licenses with either choice of software in order to ensure our render farm is fully licenced?

I have contacted Autodesk too, but its always wise to get perspective from end users as well as suppliers :)

If anyone out there has any advice, whether general or specific, I'd be very grateful.

Thanks very much,
Mike

[Olaf Finkbeiner]

HI there,
if you use 3dsmax you will be able to render Animations on all the servers with just one license of 3dsmax! With xsi and maya you will need standalone licenses for every socket...
(I think)

greets

Olaf

[mike_b]

Thanks very much for the advice - I'll check it out, tho its unlikely we'll look at Max at this time.

[dennish]

Hi Mike,
We have just finished setting up our first renderfarm using mr standalone.
It's not big by any standard, but it was easy to set up. Our main pipeline tool is maya and we did not get the performance we needed using satellite. Standalone is king there. It's expensive though, some 850 euros per cpu. Autodesk has discount offers for large accounts. Pricing in Holland is rediculous compaired to US though. You may get a better deal if you're in the States. Maya comes with licenses for satellite only. Standalone must be licenced seperately.
Also take into account that you need a farm management tool like smedge or deadline for easy management. That will also set you back some 80-120 bucks per node.
Cheers and good luck!
Dennis

[bart]

Note that we will soon start public beta testing of mental queue as well.
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/mental-queue.html