After much effort- it looks like I've convinced my office to invest in a HoudiniFX license (and one Engine license).

Now we're getting to some questions about how we're going to implement it for rendering, without needing an extra Engine license for each machine in our render farm. I know that we can use unlimited Mantra nodes so long as those nodes have IFDs to process. As an Indie user at home I'm not too familiar with generating IFDs but I'm sure I can figure it out. I plan on pointing to mostly networked assets that have been cached out (like fluids sims, abc, bgeo sequences, etc… assuming that's possible) so generation will be quick and file size will be lightweight.

As an alternative to Mantra, I've been asked to look in Rman. I've used it quite a bit before but always as an Indie user (and using a farm service like GridMarkets) so I've never had to deal with generating RIBs.

My question is this: Do I need to generate a series of RIBs (like IFDs for Mantra) before rendering with Rman over a farm OR do I just hit render on the Hqueue ROP and let it run?

Thanks!