Hi Sven Thanks for the reply. Doest seem to be nearly as elegant as the Arnold method ;(
And your point 2. is true to the point where I want to dip it in bronze and preserve it forever ;) Kind regards Angus ________________________________ From: Sven Constable [sixsi_l...@imagefront.de] Sent: 14 April 2014 10:14 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: RE: Mental Ray Standalone Hi Angus, I never touched the MR standalone route in depth, because of two things: 1. It needs extra standalone- licenses. And therefore will cost probably more than a few RR licences (I don't know if there are educational versions for MR standalone, however) 2. The export takes a decent amount of time and disk storage, depending on the scenes complexity (one file per frame and in general not very comfortable nor even idiot save ;). And students are lazy people right? Making every fuckup possible with sending their scenes). Regarding the five batch render licences that comes with every Softimage seat and the ability to use also satellite rendering within the farm (the bugs with satellite rendering were fixed by mental images several versions back), seems to me as a smarter route than using standalone MR. Getting satellite rendering to work with Royalrender is not supported out of the box but doable. I had a talk with Holger Schoenberger a while ago when I set up a farm using satellite rendering. http://www.binaryalchemy.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2291 That was more about security issues and to have it fully automated inside the production pipeline. But maybe useful. As mentioned, I have not really any experiences in using standalone MR in production because I dropped it to the reasons stated above. sven From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Angus Davidson Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 12:46 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Mental Ray Standalone Hi All This year will be the last year we will be using Softimage for our main 3d animation course. ;( For the shift to Maya next year for this course (and for our 4th year course starting in july) our Lecturer wants to go back to using Mental ray as the main renderer. (not my first choice) To that end I need to set up a render farm that will be compatible with MR in Softimage 2014 and Maya 2015. Currently I Can just install the apps on render farm machines and look into something like royal render to wrangle that. Alternatively I can get them to export to .MI2 files and use the standalone render. (This has the benefit of allowing to use Mac OSX instead of boot camping) While I have had great luck taking a similar approach in Arnold using .ass files I have never used Mental ray standalone. Anyone had good / bad experiences going the standalone route for mental ray? Kind regards Angus This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="width:100%;"> <tr> <td align="left" style="text-align:justify;"><font face="arial,sans-serif" size="1" color="#999999"><span style="font-size:11px;">This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. </span></font></td> </tr> </table>