For standalone licenses, the use of mental ray for Maya with satellite can only be initiated from the specified host for which your received your Maya key. The workstation can distribute mental ray for Maya rendering to up to four slave CPUs.
For networked licenses, use of the functionality is slightly more flexible. For networked license setups, the license running Maya and the license running mental ray for Maya can be logged out separately, allowing certain rendering tasks to be initiated remotely.
There are two possible cases when using mental ray for Maya with networked licenses:
- (Interactive) With Maya running interactively on a workstation, initiate a mental ray for Maya render (either a single frame in the Render View, Batch render or command line render) on the workstation. The networked mental ray for Maya portion of your license is logged out. This allows the mental ray satellite slaves indicated in your rayhost file to participate in the render.
- (Offline) If you launch a command line mental ray for Maya render, the computer you launched the command from then becomes the master machine for mental ray for Maya satellite rendering.
Note: If you have launched Maya but have not yet rendered with mental ray for Maya since the start of your interactive session, no mental ray for Maya line item from your networked license is checked out. You may therefore start a command line mental ray for Maya render from another host. This checks out the mental ray for Maya portion of the license, making it unavailable for any other workstation, including the workstation of the user who launched Maya.
For more details on mental ray rendering, see the Rendering sections of the Maya Help, as well as the mental ray reference included with the Maya Help.