maya software render - license?
 

Hi,

I'm new here and I'm new to Maya.

I've been asked to set up a render farm for maya (using maya software render), and I've found a piece of 3rd party software that seems to fit the bill (and works too!).

What I need to know is; is it possible to use the maya software render facility, without a license?

For example, we have 26 licenses of Maya 7. They're all currently in use, on Macs. The render farm software I'm using (and the nodes for the farm) is PC based. Obviously we want to get as much out of the farm as possible, and hence plan to use as many PCs as we can. A colleague of mine heard that the maya render application is 'free' ... is this true?

yes unlimited noes for the native software render. not MR

So the Software Render can be setup on unlimited PCs? I never knew that! What do you have to do, install Maya on each PC, using the same license? How does that work?

yeh, that would be my next question ... how to set it up.

I assume the 1st reply above says that the maya software renderer can be installed for render farm usage, but Mental Ray requires a license (obviously).

So how would you go about just installing the render element...?

(Or is it just a case of installing Maya, but not licensing it?)