View Forum Thread

> Forum Home > Support > Smedge 2016- Arnold for Maya support

	Mon, 14/Nov/2016 1:39 PM
Edith 5 Posts	We're planning to switch to Maya 2017 in a couple of months where I work. We're using Smedge 2010 for now but we'll switch eventually to Smedge 2016, but I have a very important question before. On your site, we can read that Smedge 2016 is compatible with Arnold for Maya. But on the Autodesk website, I read that: ''The Arnold functionality included with Maya 2017 can only be used within the Maya application, and cannot be not used to render your projects in the background or on a render farm'' I suppose it means that our render farm machines all need to have Maya 2017 installed for Smedge 2016 to render properly with the Arnold renderer. Am I right? It's very important for us to be able to render with Arnold. If it's doesn't work with Smedge 2016, we'll not buy it. Thank you!
	Mon, 14/Nov/2016 7:38 PM
Robin 1138 Posts	Smedge is completely compatible with any plug-in renderers for Maya, including Arnold for Maya. You can use the generic "Maya" product to avoid having Smedge even be aware of the renderer you have selected in your scene, allowing it to work with any existing or future renderer. This support has included allowing Arnold for Maya rendering for many years. The changes Autodesk are undergoing are really only licensing changes. Maya no longer ships with 5 free mental ray licenses. It also includes the Arnold plugin, but no render license for it. In order to render your files, Autodesk is now asking you to buy all the render licenses you need yourself, instead of supplying some for free. That is the only real change here. In order to run Maya 2017 with Arnold using Smedge, you will have to buy Arnold for Maya render licenses. You will have to buy render licenses from Solid Angle, Autodesk, or your reseller. This is the case with any version of Smedge. Note that we still strongly recommend you update to Smedge 2016 to get all the features, improvements and fixes available in Smedge itself from the last 6 years. But, it doesn't matter which version of Smedge you use, or even if you want to use a different render farm manager, my understanding of the changes Autodesk made is that if you want to render Arnold using Maya 2017 on a farm, you will have to buy render licenses to do so, just like if you wanted to use V-Ray, RenderMan, Maxwell, or any of the other available and non-free renderer plugins. Thanks, -robin
	Tue, 15/Nov/2016 9:34 AM
Edith 5 Posts	Hi Robin, Thank you for your fast reply! So, if I understand correctly, if Maya scenes use Arnold and we want to render those scenes with Smedge, we absolutely need to buy Arnold licences for batch rendering. Edited by author on Tue, 15/Nov/2016 10:48 AM
	Tue, 15/Nov/2016 4:44 PM
Robin 1138 Posts	My understanding (and I may be wrong as I don't do Autodesk licensing myself, of course), is that if you want to render Arnold for Maya 2017 at all (no matter which render manager you use), you will need to buy render licenses, just like if you wanted to use Vray, RenderMan, Maxwell, or any other commercial plug-in renderer. Thanks, -robin

Page 1 of 1