Hi all,

we have very pleasant news for those of you who are frequently rendering on remote machines using Mental Ray Satellite that are connected and controlled from a Maya or 3ds Max plugin:

The Mental Ray Standalone does not require a license anymore.
It is completely free to use on any number of machines.

This is a great extension for users of the Mental Ray plugins who depend on network-distributed rendering for more rendering throughput. It is also lifting any restrictions for usage in a render farm when running from the command-line or managed by a render job manager like Backburner.

What is Mental Ray Satellite rendering?

Unlike starting separate render jobs in a render farm, the Satellite rendering mode allows to connect remote machines in the internal network to your main Mental Ray rendering engine, so that they take over the heavy part of rendering the image or animation without stressing your main machine, which is already busy running your DCC tool. You can continue working with Maya or 3ds Max in the usual way, since Mental Ray is handling the data distribution and network communication under-the-hood. Naturally, the network speed and machine configurations have great impact on the overall experience and a fluent workflow.

In Maya, the satellite mode can be enabled selectively for preview rendering in Render View, and also for batch rendering in the background. However, progressive rendering is not supported in this distributed mode. That makes it less useful in the interactive viewport rendering with Mental Ray, although it’s generally possible to enable it there too. You have the option to let Satellites do ALL the rendering remotely, freeing your main machine from any rendering load (perfect for a background batch render), or set them to contribute to the main rendering as needed (like for a quick preview render).

Otherwise, there are no limitations on the number of machines or CPU cores that can be utilized, different to the original Satellite mode in Autodesk products. However, technically, the overall benefit for rendering may decrease at some point when too many remote machines need to be synchronized over a potentially occupied network.

This latest Mental Ray Standalone can also be used from the command-line, of course, now without any restrictions and no licensing setup.

Please download the new installers below for your platform. We provide versions that are compatible with Maya 2018 and 3ds Max 2018 Mental Ray. We have no plans to upgrade to later versions of Maya or 3ds Max.

Happy rendering! 😀

Downloads

Mental Ray Free Standalone / Satellite