mental ray network rendering allows you to distribute the rendering process across multiple machines on your network. You can do this by using mental ray for Maya Satellite or mental ray standalone.
The mental ray for Maya plug-in that is integrated in Maya always lets you render on an unlimited number of local CPUs. mental ray satellite rendering can take place on four additional remote machines, with up to four processors and four GPU’s each and an unlimited number of cores.
The mental ray network rendering process can be invoked while working within Maya (in the Render View or batch rendering) or from the command line within Maya.
A mental ray distributed rendering can speed up all of the following tasks:
When using Satellite rendering with Lighting/Shading > Batch Bake (mental ray), select Single object as your Bake optimization method. Baking, including baking final gather and photons (global illumination) is only supported for Satellite if the Single object option is used. Only baking to textures is supported for Satellite rendering.
When using mental ray for Maya and mental ray for Maya Satellite, master refers to the machine that is submitting the network render requests interactively, via batch or command line, and slave refers to an individual machine with mental ray standalone or mental ray for Maya Satellite on the network that receives and performs part of a network render and sends the information back to the master.
Any machine with mental ray standalone can be a master, a slave or both at the same time.