Network Render Farm Help

[mbcburt]

I have sent several messages to Octane support but have not heard back from them. My company is looking into a different renderer than mental ray. We really like Octane and would like to use it. Our window is getting smaller and we will need to make a decision between Octane and V Ray. If I can get some of these questions answered it will help us lean towards Octane. If anyone can help with answers to these questions it would be appreciated.

We have 10 artist that work remote, we have used backburner to manage our remote farm render jobs. My question for a remote render farm is:

1. How does Octane handle multiple render jobs that are submitted? Does it que them up in order of submission? Does it Octane do something similar to backburner for managing more than one submitted render?

2. I know the master machine has to have the stand alone version of Octane as well we will be using the 3ds max Octane plugin. My question is on the slave machines do we just need the stand alone license version or do we need both the stand alone plus the 3ds max plugin on each slave?

3. How does the 12 GPU limit work? Say we have 24 computers we would like to use on our net render. How would we license so we can utilize more than 12 GPUs?

4. Is it possible to use the trial version of Octane to test our net render farm?

[abreukers]

hi mbcurt,
Octane does not have a built-in render manager. So it does not really know how the render is placed in the queue. However, Octane can work with other 3D application built-in managers like backburner, they should be in the same LAN and each node/machine that will be used for rendering should have the necessary licenses. Therefore, if you will be using 3ds Max with backburner, each of your machines will need a combo license (one standalone license and one 3ds Max plugin license). The 12-GPU limit is constant, even if there are 24 machines (with 24 GPUs or more) licensed, the others will not be used when the 12-GPU limit is reached.
Unfortunately, the demo versions cannot be used to trial this because it cannot save anything. Can I ask which octane support email address you've sent your previous email to?

[mbcburt]

Thanks for the reply and information. That is very helpful and answers my questions. Great news that it can work with back burner.

The help support email was sent to - [email protected]
I got a confirmation that the email was sent but never got a reply back.

Thanks again,
mbcburt

[bepeg4d]

Hi,
the net rendering 12 GPUs limit is per Master IP address, so you can set up two different masters with different IP with 12 GPUs each
ciao beppe

[mbcburt]

Thanks for the info, we are working with our IT dept. to refresh our artist as well as farm machines to work best with octane before we purchase. If we purchase v2 now is there an approximate of how much the upgrade will be for v3?

Thanks