Are render nodes worth buying for our needs?

Rendering V-Ray
1

Hi, all.
We are currently working with V-Ray 2.x and planning to upgrade to 3.x for Rh5 and for Rh6 when it comes out.
My question comes from our workflow. We, till the time being, have worked with single image production, static, and with no overtly large sizes (usually HD). We work in a really fast environment and have balanced quality/speed for our needs.

Would buying render nodes be worth the hassle of setting them up with such a workflow?
I tried to render two different images on two different machies at the same time for production optimization but the back-and-forth between the machines made me crazy and costed more time at the end.
I have no previous experience with render nodes and I´m worried that the set-up time will be counterproductive like the double rendering…

2

Get a good extra gpu it’s like a having a render node on vray 3x.

3

But the cost of an extra GPU is much higher than that of the render nodes, and for them we could use our actual office computers, right?

4

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you have 10 V-Ray licences bought and they normally come with the same number of node licences therefore you can distribute your render via Swarm inside the whole 10 computer pool…?

5

The price of the workstation alone is X and the workstation with 5 render nodes is Y>X.
My question is if it is better to buy two workstation licenses and use the 2nd as node when possible or to invest in two workstation+nodes and invest time in the hassle of seting up the farm in the other office computers.

6

The new tool to do distributed rendering in V-Ray 3 (Swarm) is very efficient, it’s a no-brainer.
Everybody in our group is using it now, even for small test renders. There’s no special setup; if V-Ray is installed, the computer can be part of the render farm.

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