Hello. I'm a director of computer animation (a new major) at a small
college. I'm looking to set up a small render farm, and have a few
questions. Ours is a laptop program, meaning students will be doing
work on their own laptops, using their own licenses of Maya Unlimited
(8). I'd like them to be able to deposit their projects on a file
server, and render on the farm, then get the finished animation off the
same server. There is only enough money for 4 or 5 nodes. I'm looking
at a couple of different render management applications, including
Deadline and EnFuzion. I'm mostly wondering about what I need to
install for actual rendering on the nodes (each node will be dual core,
dual CPU by the way). I'm trying to keep costs down. Do I need to
install Maya Unlimited on each node? Could I just install Maya
Complete, since the licenses will ONLY be used for rendering? i.e.
will a Maya Unlimited file be renderable using Maya Complete via a
setup like I'm proposing? I'd love for students to have the option to
render using either the Maya sw renderer, Mental Ray or even the vector
renderer. I was also considering Mental Ray Standalone for the nodes,
but that limits us to just Mental Ray, and is probably more expensive
than just installing Maya.
Thanks, Ezra
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