Hi guys, Im trying to wrap my head around Deadlines vray distributed renderer plugin, am I correct in thinking that this kind of a support for a render-at-the-workstation-solution? That you dont so much submit a scene to deadline, but instead render the scene that you have loaded on your local computer (and initiate via the deadline Vray DR plugin for maya/max) ?
In that case, is there any other out-of-the-box support for having the “Masternode” in that initiates the render be just another node in deadline, and the job-initiation be some kind of task or prejob script or whatnot?
Hey there,
Yup, you guessed correctly. We support both workflows here. The first one you described is the “Interactive” DBR type, where a user can “reserve” X number of Deadline Slave nodes to run up the VRaySpawner/CoronaDR/Mental Ray satellite process and help them Light’n’Render a scene file:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … y-dbr.html
The other workflow is called: “Off-load” DBR and currently we support VRay, VRay RT & MR. (I’m writing Corona support for off-load as I type this):
3dsMax:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … f-load-dbr
3dsCmd:
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … f-load-dbr
The main difference is that the 3dsMax option will mean the first node in your farm (acting as MASTER) will need to grab a full-gui 3dsMax license, whilst the other ‘frames’ of the job will run up VRaySpawner.exe. If you use the “3dsCmd” plugin instead, then you skip needing to use a full-gui 3dsMax license for the first node (MASTER). Most users use this 2nd option.
If your interested in Corona DR off-load or more fancy stuff like Dynamic off-load DBR (add/remove nodes to currently running render), then please apply for access to Deadline 8.0 beta program 
EDIT: 21st Nov 2016 - Corona off-load DR support is currently not possible given the current implementation of how Corona DR works. We have been in discussion with the Corona developers and we believe a re-worked version of Corona, possibly as early as 1.6 (scheduled end of Jan 2017) may then make this possible. Once this is possible in Corona, then Deadline can look at adding support in a future version.
Thanks a lot mike, that’s excellent news. The Dynamic off-load DBR seems quite interesting as well, I’ll just have to convince our network admin to go along with a upgrade (fat chance that will happen!) in case we decide it will necessary.