OREANDA-NEWS. February 25, 2016. Ever wish you could harness the power of an entire network of workstations to make light work of your most complex designs? Now you can, with Iray Server, our distributed rendering software.

Available for a free 90-day trial starting today, Iray Server coordinates a network of machines as a “cluster” to speed the creation of images. It runs on the hardware of your choice. And you can use it with any NVIDIA Iray physically based rendering product — like our plug-ins for Autodesk 3dsMax and Maya or software products that use Iray — without any overhead of the host application.

Iray Server is a great tool for designers and the production companies employing them because it speeds up the creative process. Machines running Iray Server coordinate with each other to reduce the time needed to render an image. This allows you to process images in a fraction of the time it would take a single machine.

You can Stream interactive rendering from Iray Server to another machine, allowing a laptop to have multi-GPU power when using NVIDIA professional GPUs [Add link].

Users from across the network can submit jobs to a Queue for easy management. You can manage the queue from any browser that can reach the network — even from a phone. Submitting jobs is fast, easy and reliable. There’s no reliance on paths or naming. Previously submitted information is securely cached, so the same geometry or image is never sent twice.

To further simplify your workflow, you can modify and resubmit jobs without going back to the host application. Systems can join or leave the cluster without canceling an ongoing job. What you see rendering locally will render the same in Iray Server across the network — a rare claim, indeed.

And it’s extremely easy to set up.  Spend a minute or two installing the software. Then double-click a new shortcut on the desktop and get straight to rendering.  That’s it.