What is a Render Node?

Rendering applications such as Maxwell Render, V-Ray and Bella Render can utilise rendernodes. They effectively allow you to use the resources of other machines on your network to increase your overall rendering capacity. Typically, this is done to increase the speed at which renders can be completed and becomes even more useful when rendering animations which are simply a vast number of single renders in sequence.

Nodes may also be known as 'slaves'. In essence a node is a machine or processor that can be used to process the render. Some applications refer to an entire machine or its processor as a node, whilst others may classify any processing thread as a node (modern processors often incorporate multi-threaded, multiple cores). V-Ray and Maxwell Render consider a machine to be the node.

By joining up render nodes on a network in this way, you are creating a render farm.

More Information

Maxwell Render - Render Node Setup

V-Ray Distributed Rendering

Bella Render - Node Setup