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This page provides information on the V-Ray Swarm distributed rendering service.


Overview

V-Ray Swarm is the new V-Ray Distributed Rendering manager. The next evolution of V-Ray Distributed Rendering offers a number of features that make rendering with V-Ray even faster. Currently, V-Ray Swarm is available in V-Ray for SketchUp, V-Ray for Rhino, and V-Ray for Revit. Its interface is also accessible by a web browser. 


For more detailed information on how to use V-Ray Swarm please refer to the Distributed Rendering page.


Features

All that is needed to dedicate a machine as a V-Ray Distributed Rendering server is to install and run V-Ray Swarm on it. V-Ray Swarm discovers and adds machines for rendering, handles the installation of V-Ray Standalone builds on each machine, starts and stops the rendering process, monitors CPU, RAM, and GPU resources per system, and deploys the configuration of V-Ray on all V-Ray Swarm machines with a single click. V-Ray Swarm makes V-Ray Distributed Rendering easier than ever.


The new features that V-Ray Swarm adds to V-Ray Distributed Rendering are: 

  • Ensures every machine is rendering with the same version of V-Ray.
  • Provides the ability to monitor and manage the entire V-Ray Swarm network through a web interface.
  • Monitors the state of each computer to make sure that V-Ray is active and ready, and restarts V-Ray if necessary.
  • Automatically discovers machines running V-Ray Swarm over the network, eliminating the need to manually input the IP address/hostname of each render server machine.
  • Automatically or manually assigns a computer to be the one that controls and manages V-Ray Swarm on the render node machines.

V-Ray Swarm 2 has released a new version: 2.0.17. This update makes the setup process easier by removing the need for an Origin node. Download the latest V-Ray Swarm 2 version and see the Release Notes here.

V-Ray Swarm 2.0.17 is incompatible with the previously released 2.0.15, i.e. all Swarm instances in the cluster should be updated.

V-Ray Swarm controls V-Ray Distributed Rendering on each render node machine; the actual rendering is handled by V-Ray Standalone.  

Each machine participating in the render job requires a V-Ray Render Node license. This includes the workstation initiating the rendering process.

V-Ray Swarm does not provide licenses. Instead, each render node must be connected to a Chaos License Server.

It is important to prepare the network of nodes that take part in the render job before beginning the rendering process. To set up your origin node, follow the steps on the How To Set Up Swarm Clusters page.

If there are multiple origins, remove the redundant ones by closing the Origin script command lines on all machines except for one. Then, make sure to restart the Swarm service on the non-Origin machines.

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