I work in a corporate IT environment and I have 3 or so very nice machines that I could use as render slaves. However they are trapped behind a strict corporate firewall. Being unable to get my IT to open ports or shared folders which I believe any render farm app would need I am looking for options. My efforts to set up Hqueue have been futile and I have some impending deadlines.

My scenes use Karma and I have a single FX license which I believe provides up to 3 Karma render nodes.

I don't mind doing command line renders on each machine if that is what it takes.

What is my best and most cost effective options to employ these machines for rendering my scenes?
Would I need an Engine License for each machine that I need to do a command line render on? $749 per machine?

I am familiar with generating ifd's for Mantra renders and it seems that generating the .usd for Karma is a similar workflow and I am good with that.

My last options seems to be to ditch these machines and turn to a cloud rendering service. Open for suggestions on good Karma render provider as well.

thanks for any suggestions
Jeff

Can't solve your whole problem, but just to let you know that you could generate your usd files on your work machine and render it on your other ones with Husk, using only Karma licenses. No need for Engine licenses if you do it that way.

Deadline is great. It does not come with a husk plugin last I checked, so we had to make our own.

But Prism 2 pipeline does come with a Husk Plugin for Deadline.

But maybe the firewall will make the setup problematic.

Tanto
Can't solve your whole problem, but just to let you know that you could generate your usd files on your work machine and render it on your other ones with Husk, using only Karma licenses. No need for Engine licenses if you do it that way.

Thanks so much for this. I have managed to get the machines working by manually copying the generated usd across the network to a commonly named folder. I can then use HQueue to manage the Karma rendering on them. woohoo
Jeff

Just a follow up on this. I realize now that with the login licensing that I can submit a usd job to one of the render clients and if I close my workstation license quickly the render client can grab it to generate the usd files and then go back to a Karma license when finished. This really helps my workflow since I only have a single FX license to work with. Coming from RoyalRender HQueue feels a little primitive but it gets the job done.