INFO: What Licenses do you need for a render farm?
A render farm for frame-based rendering uses either mental ray standalone licenses, batch (eg xsibatch) licenses, or some combination.
For a render farm you would purchase some combination of the following licenses:
- Batch licenses (a Batch license allows you either render from the command line with xsibatch, or run a script with xsibatch [for example, to generate a .mi file])
- mental ray standalone licenses
- Batch Universal licenses (Batch Universal includes a Batch license and two mental ray standalone licenses).
Batch licenses allow you to render by running xsibatch jobs on the render farm nodes.
mental ray standalone licenses would allow you to render by running ray3.exe (so you would have to output mi files from XSI, typically done using xsibatch).
CPUs per license
xsibatch will use as many CPUs as there are on the local computer.
Each CPU on a render node will use one mental ray standalone license, no matter how many cores per CPU. So for example, a Dual dual-core render node will take two mental ray standalone licenses. And a Dual CPU, single core render node will also take two mental ray standalone licenses.
Q: Can I set up a render farm using the 4 rendering licenses that come with Essentials?
No, not really.
The 4 "satellite" licenses that come with Essentials are for tile-based rendering, not for frame-based rendering. So Essentials can use 4 CPUs to help render an individual frame.
Essentials does not include any batch licenses, so you cannot really use xsibatch (if you do, xsibatch will take the interactive Essentials license).
Q: Can I set up a render farm using my Foundation licenses?
No. Foundation allows you to render from the XSI user interface. You cannot do any kind of batch, command-line rendering.
See also INFO: Understanding XSI Licensing
