Iray Bridge

Iray Bridge is a feature shipped with Iray that allows efficient use of the resources of a remote cluster to render a local scene over a relatively high-latency low-bandwidth connection such as the Internet. Iray Bridge is designed to be integrated with a minimal effort and to be easy to use.

Iray Bridge comes in the form of two plugins, one client-side plugin and one server-side plugin. The client-side plugin makes new Iray Bridge render modes available that can be used to render using a remote cluster the same way as when rendering locally. Swaping between local render modes and Bridge render modes can be done at any time. The server-side plugin makes available the server-side Iray Bridge application that provides the server-side features needed by the Iray Bridge render contexts.

The data required on the remote host will be sent automatically by Iray Bridge as part of rendering a frame and features such as server-side caching of data and sending only what has changed since the last render minimize the data that needs to be sent. Iray Bridge supports streaming and low-latency hardware H.264 encoding and decoding to ensure high interactivity, as well as lossless video formats to deliver uncompressed frames for final renderings.

Iray Bridge also provides a scene snapshot feature that very efficiently saves the current state of the scene in a snapshot on the server that can later be imported off-line to perform things like batch renderings.