This page provides information on how to use the V-Ray Swarm distributed rendering service in its host application.
Open up any project. V-Ray Swarm can be enabled in two different ways. The first is by opening the Settings panel from the V-Ray toolbar. Navigate to the Swarm tab and click V-Ray Swarm Enabled.
Click Refresh to see the tags for the machines that are currently running. Click the tags to enable or disable them so that your Swarm render distributes only to the machines with that tag. Selecting two or more tags will distribute to machines that have at least one of the selected tags. This can be done while rendering.
Now click Render Production icon to start this rendering. V-Ray will first calculate secondary Illumination, so you won’t be able to have a visual representation of the other machines jumping in to help this render until V-Ray gets to rendering the buckets.
The second way to enable V-Ray Swarm is from within the V-Ray Rendering Progress dialog. Click on the Distributed Rendering arrow to expand it. This bar shows how many machines are being used. If you slide the Goal slider to the right, you can dynamically add more machines to this render.
The system will have to send project files to the render node, so it takes a moment for the transfer. As soon as it completes the transfer, you can see a slew of new buckets appear on the image that is being processed by the other Swarm machines.
The green marker displays what part of all available machines are rendering the job. Node and CPU information is displayed upon in the Current usage bar. In case some of the machines are busy/unavailable, a marker in beige will display on the opposite side of the green one, showing their amount.
The Goal slider beneath the bar can be adjusted dynamically to add or remove assigned machines during the rendering process.
The V-Ray Swarm button opens up the V-Ray Swarm web interface. Alternatively, it can be accessed by typing in the IP address of the current Master Node machine on the default port 24267.