Several render engine and plugin updates were rolled out to the farm last night. Most significantly, we did the first rollout of V-Ray Next to our Max and Maya instances. Gory details below:
- V-Ray Next rolled out to Max and Maya 2018 instances
- Redshift updated to 2.6.29 in all Max, Maya, and Cinema 4D instances
- Arnold updated to 3.1.2 in Maya 2017 and 2018, 2.3.33 in Max 2018, and 2.4.4 in C4D R18-R20
- Renderman updated to 22.3 in Maya 2017 and 2018
- Cinema 4D R20 updated to R20.030
- People in Motion 2.01 rolled out to Cinema 4D R17-R19
- DK Classic Erosion updated to 1.1.2.1 in Terragen 4 and Frontier builds
All respective render app Support Portal pages have had their deployed versions updated, so make sure you’re not looking at cached copies of those pages if you want to be correctly informed.
In other news, the farm continues to expand its hardware footprint, both with additional CPU and GPU nodes. Many nodes of both types have been added this month already, with more yet to be deployed. Even more hardware is on order. Holiday rush render jobs are somewhat typical during this time of year, so keep that in mind if you’re working on something that’s time sensitive. We add hardware as our average load increases, and we can’t add it instantly. That means the CPU and/or GPU farms will be heavily laden at peak times. Higher Power levels are the best tool to combat against that, but a bit of planning and spreading out multiple job submissions over time can also work wonders.
We hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
