autodesk mentalray standalone licensing

[mori]

We're currrently evaluating to setup a render-farm of 100 units PC and I have 4 questions regarding autodesk mentalray standalone 2012 that need your kind assistance;

1. Can Maya 2012 use Iray in MentalRay standalone?

2. Can MentalRay Standalone support Maya .mb / .ma file format ?

3. Is all Plug-in of Maya (realflow, syflex etc) support in MentalRay Standalone?

4. If I have a HP z800 with 2x 6 cores (total 12 cores) Workstation, How many MentalRay Standalone License I have to purchase. If I've hyper-tread switch on ( total 24 cores), How many MentalRay Standalone License I have to purchase.

Thanks for your time and hope to hear from you soon...

mori

[bart]

1. Yes

2. No. Standalone takes in scene description in .mi format. Use Maya's "render -r mi" to convert ma/mb to mi. This doesn't use a Maya license, but does need to verify Maya is installed somewhere in the network. Also, if you check out our new script for using standalone, a lot of the work for converting to mi is handled for you. See the sticky post for this at the top of the Maya sub forum under application specific.

3. This depends on the shaders used by the plugins. If you move the shaders used into the appropriate locations searched by mr standalone, it should be able to work fine.

4. One standalone license per machine for AD mr standalone 2012. Please double check with Autodesk on that.

[bylee]

My colleague ask Autodesk Taiwan about the mental ray 2012 standalone license. They said standalone is still one license per CPU. Not per machine
So In this case, HP z800 need two mental ray standalone license.

[Remydrh]

Really? When I checked here in L.A. it was a license per machine not CPU socket.

[SunDevilDave]

So which was it?

Is Standalone licensed per machine or per physical CPU?

[Remydrh]

When rendering with Standalone on a single machine with a Dual Quad Core Xeon setup (8 cores, two CPUs) it uses 1 license for me. Render nodes with new Dual Hex Core Xeons also pulled a single license per node.

I do not know if there is a limit on sockets. (like a machine with Quad CPUs, which is rare)

Licensing is handled by Autodesk for most customers.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet...&siteID=123112

Dave, you're West Coast, right? Cliff at RFX should be able to tell you or find out.

[SunDevilDave]

Bart and you are confirming per Machine. I don't think there is limit as a co-worker runs 20+ processors on the same machine. Which when I think about it...answers my question right there...duh.

Thanks for your help.

[steve]

Is Standalone licensed per machine or per physical CPU?

The recent mental ray Standalone releases like the Autodesk 2012 editions based on mental ray 3.9, and later, request one license per machine, no matter how many CPUs or CPU cores, and no matter if 32bit or 64bit.

Previous versions of mental ray, like version 3.8 and earlier, detected the number of CPUs (with any number of cores) in a system and requested one license per CPU.

This licensing change caused quite a cost reduction for customers with multi-CPU machines.

Best, Steve.