How to Setup a VRay Render Farm

Ahhh… all those painfully slow minutes and seconds that we all spent in front of the screen, waiting for the next pixel to appear, so many memories. But, wait, we do have relatively cheap and quite fast processors now-days, so why not set up your own render farm in that case?

As technology advances, we have much more processor speed available, but it is important to have really fast processors when it comes to rendering nice scenes with VRay. In this article we are going to explore some possibilities and solutions that VRay offers us to render faster. Namely: we shall set up our own render farm!

I’m sure that any serious studio or individual needs to cut down production time. In case of studios, I’m also pretty sure that there are quite a few computers around, and they should be more-less newer vintage. In case of individuals in the rendering market, if you do not have, go buy another (or a couple) of computers plus – you are going to need them to be over the competition.

VRay and Network Rendering

VRay is a pretty awesome piece of software when it comes to using it with render farms. It has a built in option for network rendering, and is very simple to set up. There are a couple of rules that needs to be followed, but those are quite simple, and should be pointed out to the artists when working on a project.

For starters, you will need:

1. VRay installed on all computers – as there is no stand-alone version of VRay has to be installed with Max, Maya, etc.

2. A local network where computers can access each other – take care that firewalls are not blocking, that all computers are in the same network group.

Your system administrator can set that up, if not already, and it is also quite simple to create a local network, so I won’t go into detail there. One thing I need to warn you here is that you need a fast network, so low quality (slow) wireless connections are out of the question – if you are connected over WiFi @ 54MBPS – it will not be enough. A good old hard-wired 1GBPS is what you need. If you are asking if you could somehow do this over the Internet – forget it – it will be way too slow – just too many data exchanged in your future render farm.

Your First Render Farm

Once you have all that, you need to start the VRay render server on the slave machines by launching the “Launch V-Ray DR spawner”, which is located in the folder where you installed VRay: Start/Programs/Chaos Group/V-Ray Adv for 3dsmax 20xx x86/Distributed rendering. Note that the path may differ in regard to what software you installed VRay to, but take care that the 4Th section of the path starts with “V-Ray Adv for” and then Max, Maya or whatever. If you are running in Vista or Win7, make sure these have administrator privileges by either going into properties and assigning them the privilege, or by running them as administrator. If you do not do this it simply wont start.

When it starts, you should have a small VRay icon in the right of the task-bar, and your render farm should be ready to go!

Setting Up VRay

Now that we have the render farm running, you need to set up the parameters on the master machine. Bring up the Render Setup, assuming that you already set VRay to be the Production renderer, and switch to the “Settings” tab. There is a “Distributed Rendering” check-box there which you need to check. Once that is done, click on the “Settings” just right to it (all underlined with a fancy red color).

Ok, now, you need to tell VRay on what IP addresses are the render farm slave servers located by checking out the local IP addresses of the slave computers. There are plenty tutorials on the net how to find that out, so I’m not going into detail regarding that (type “how to find local ip address windows” in Google and there you go).

Once you have obtained the IP addresses of the slave machines, you need to enter them by clicking on the “Add Server” button and typing in the IP adress. Once you added all your servers, you can also check the “Save hosts in the scene” check-box, so the IPs get into the Max/Maya file that you are saving, and might need to work on it some other day too. If you take that file to another render farm, you will need to repeat the process of finding the IP addresses.

The check boxes left to the IP numbers should be self-explanatory – determines if we should use the server or not.

So, basically, if you made it thus far, you can hit the render to test your render farm and see how much faster your scene is generated!

Additional Considerations and Rules

There are a few rules that need to be followed not to confuse VRay and get a bad rendering using your freshly set up render farm.

First, all files should be on an absolute path – this means that the textures, accompanying files are on the server X, and all machines “see” the same path to the resources. Failing to respect this rule will result with e.g. a rendering without textures on machines that haven’t got the resource available.

Slave machines should be left alone – you will anyway not be able to work on them, as the VRay render server program shall take all the CPU power away.

It is recommended to make low-res tests before you start your 4 day rendering project, just to be sure that everything is OK.

Got a question about creating a VRay render farm? Comments section is below, so knock yourself out!