Question for big brains at McNeel or Blender experts: Is there a way to have a standalone version of Cycles that one can run on a (local/file) server or a separate workstation that one can submit render jobs (simple stills, turntables or path animations) from Rhino 7? It seems that would be the logical step Cycles being open source, and if such a plug-play solution were available, it would make Rhino quite attractive even with the limited Cycles implementation that it currently has, now that it looks like McNeel has accepted rendering not a revenue stream but a selling point/feature.
The ideal setup would be to have dedicated server(s), if available, and CAD workstations,when idle, to be able to simply share the workload seamlessly at frame level. I have used Brazil in the past via scripting in exactly that manner, and it worked great, and I am sure it would wok with cycles too, but having a separate seat of Rhino for that purpose seems to be overkill.
Thank you, I did exactly that, modifying a Brazil version I had done quite a while ago. It’s not a big deal for us to get one or two extra Rhino seats to use as these makeshift distributed render nodes, but I hope you get to that point in your list because a standalone more polished solution, even if comes at a small cost, would probably be attractive to many small offices.
That said, one advantage of having a full fledged Rhinos as nodes, that I had forgotten, is that with the script interpreter and the geometry engine on the node, users can submit complex scripts inside the model file to render animations, which makes the whole process more compact and streamlined. So ideally, you’d have to have the full Rhino without the user interface as the render node.