Local Render on Slave - will I need a second licence?

[dj_buckley]

I want to render some sequences locally on one of my slaves.  But I want to keep working on my master workstation on other scenes.

Will that require me to have two licences?

I was initially planning on rendering through DR for all sequences directly from the master, but the frames are that quick 6-7 minutes, that they've finished rendering on the master before the slaves have finished downloading/parsing etc.

So DR is pointless.

My master workstation is slower than the slaves in terms of pure rendering power, so I was hoping to send the render to render locally on the fastest slave while I keep working on the master workstation.

Possible? 

[TomG]

You'll need an extra Render Node license, yes - if you are a historical user, you may already have 3 extra render nodes included (if you had a subscription before Corona 8 and have kept it going without interruption since then). Otherwise, a purchase of an extra render node license will be needed (not a full license mind you, as you aren't planning to have Corona open and using its GUI on two machines at once). Hope that helps!

[dj_buckley]

Hi Tom

I do have some legacy render node licenses so how would I go about doing what I need to do?  How to submit the job to render locally on one machine?

[TomG]

Personally when I had to do this, I just used Backburner, where the main machine was not included as a rendering machine and the second machine was (you can set up a list of what machines are to be used). Then when you submit to backburner, only the second machine starts rendering, leaving your main machine free to continue working. There are other network rendering managers out there too, but Backburner is the one included with Max and basic and un-updated as it is, it worked just fine :)

[dj_buckley]

Hi Tom

I have this working with Pulze, to a degree.  The downside being that after each frame, Max restarts, reloads the scene etc and then starts rendering.  I was hoping to have it behave like it would if I just rendered on my main workstation.  Open the scene, press render, each frame renders immediately after the previous one.

So at the minute it's not quite the same as rendering locally.  All of the reopening/reloading adds significant time to the render as the scene is asset heavy but renders fast once loaded.

Any ideas?

[TomG]

I don't know Pulze, sorry. From what I recall with Backburner, the job was sent including frame range, and the machine just started up the non-GUI Max, grabbed itself a Corona license, and then rendered the frame sequence it had been given without ever closing Max (acting just like rendering on the main machine). Where more than one machine was involved, each was given a frame range by Backburner and same thing, they started and kept going without interruption through their frame range. Whether Pulze does this differently, I couldn't say :(

[dj_buckley]

Ok great thanks Tom.  I'll give BB a go