Networking overview

neuray is a distributed system supporting different networking modes, e.g., UDP multicast and TCP unicast with or without automatic host discovery. Such a cluster of connected hosts uses a distributed database with redundancy to distribute data (e.g., scene data) and jobs (e.g., rendering requests). The configuration of the networking facilities is flexible and left to the user to support different use cases, e.g., a master/slave setup, or a setup of equal peers sharing resources.

neuray provides a built-in HTTP server framework that can be used to implement a HTTP server that executes C++ code in reaction to HTTP requests (including serving of static files). This HTTP server can for example be used by an integration to provide remote viewing capabilities. neuray also provides a built-in RTMP server framework to provide RTMP streams of rendered images.

For network rendering in local clusters it is required that all files are available on all involved hosts. The absolute filenames do not necessarily need to be identical on all hosts, but the relative filenames based on the configured search paths need to be identical on all hosts.