The OmnibusCloud plugin renders your 3ds Max scenes on the network — on machines that don't have Max installed, hold no renderer licenses, and don't even run Windows. Your .max file never leaves your machine: the plugin exports the open scene into a neutral scene format — geometry with full smoothing fidelity, materials, lights, cameras, animation baked frame-exact — uploads it with its texture assets, and the network renders it across many machines.
One thing to understand before anything else: the network does not render with your renderer. The neutral scene is rebuilt and rendered with a physically-based path tracer. The goal is faithful look transfer — the result should read as the image you authored — not bit-exact replication of your local output. What that means in practice is covered below.
Before you start
- An OmnibusCloud account — the same one used across the portal and the client. You'll create it during sign-in if you don't have one.
- Machines to render on. The plugin submits work into a scope — a campaign →, a private group → pooling your studio's or friends' machines, or your own machines running the OmnibusCloud client →. The rendering machines can be Windows, Linux or Apple Silicon Macs — a Mac mini quietly rendering your Max scene is perfectly normal here.
- 3ds Max 2027 on Windows.
The plugin does not require the OmnibusCloud client on your machine — they are independent and play different roles: the client contributes a machine's power to the network; the plugin submits work to it. Install either, or both. They coexist happily on the same machine: put the client next to the plugin, and your workstation becomes one of the nodes rendering your own jobs — while a weaker machine can stay a pure submitter and let the network do the heavy lifting.
1. Install the plugin
Download the signed MSI installer from the downloads page → and run it — for everyone on the machine or just for you, your choice; it also upgrades any previous version in place. On the next 3ds Max start, an OmnibusCloud menu appears, along with a dockable toolbar carrying the same commands.
2. Sign in
OmnibusCloud → Sign in… opens your system browser with the OmnibusCloud sign-in form. Complete it there, and back in Max the dialog confirms: Signed in — Render and Export are now available. You sign in once; the session persists across Max restarts.
3. Render
OmnibusCloud → Render on OmnibusCloud… opens the Render dialog. The top line shows the scene you're about to render — file, resolution, frame range — and below it, the decisions:
- Output — Image (the current frame, with an optional Split frame across machines for heavy stills: set the tile grid and overlap) or Animation (the frame range, delivered as an image sequence or an encoded video). Format and output size are adjustable right here.
- Target — where it renders: your campaigns and private groups, listed by name and labeled project or group.
- If the scene uses V-Ray scanned materials, an opt-in appears: bake them with your local V-Ray before upload — it preserves fabric and suede detail the neutral export can't carry, at the cost of extra local render time.
Press Render. The scene is exported, uploaded and submitted in one motion, with live progress right in the dialog — and, as the dialog itself says, close to keep working: the render continues on the network while you model on.
When it's done, the result is right there — a preview, Open, Open folder, and New render to go again. Back come single frames, tiled high-res stills, animation sequences, or an encoded video — depending on what you asked for.
What to expect from the result
The plugin is built around honest look transfer, and it tells you exactly where it stands:
- Scanline and Physical/Arnold-material scenes are the fully supported path — including Scanline's non-physical quirks, which are emulated by documented rules rather than ignored. Skinned and deforming animation travels frame-exact; raytraced glass and mirrors, mirrored geometry, motion blur, standard and photometric lights with their real decay semantics, and HDRI / procedural / screen-mapped environments all carry over. If the scene has no render camera, a synthetic one is taken from the active perspective viewport.
- V-Ray has dedicated support, approximate by design: VRayMtl maps to a neutral PBR surface; VRay lights, sun, dome-HDRI environments and physical-camera exposure carry over, and scanned materials can be baked locally with your own V-Ray before upload (opt-in). Procedural V-Ray maps and tone-mapping curves don't translate yet.
- Corona, Octane, Redshift — untested; the exporter takes a safe viewport read.
- Not supported yet: volumetrics, particles/hair, deep procedural map trees, animated visibility, XRef scenes.
Nothing fails silently: everything the exporter approximates or can't carry leaves a named diagnostic at export — which feature, which objects by name, and what to do about it — collected in a diagnostics window you can open right from the plugin. The full, release-by-release feature matrix lives in Capabilities & Known Limitations →.
Where the plugin fits naturally: draft and preview passes of heavy animations, previz, lighting and camera iterations you'd rather get overnight, personal and portfolio work — anywhere "reads right" matters more than "matches to the pixel". For Scanline and Physical-material scenes, the transfer is close enough that many will treat it as their final pass. If your delivery pipeline requires pixel-matching your local V-Ray output, this is not that tool — and we'd rather tell you now.
Bonus: export your scene as a .blend
OmnibusCloud → Export Scene… is a standalone command, independent of rendering. Its default target hands you back your scene as a self-contained Blender file with all textures packed — a 3ds Max → Blender converter, if that's all you want from the plugin. (A raw local export of the neutral scene format is also available for pipelines and archives.)
What's next
- Pooling your studio's machines for renders? → Getting Started with Private Groups →
- Asking the community to help render a bigger project? → Getting Started with Campaigns →
- Contributing idle power from your own machines? → Getting Started with the OmnibusCloud Client →
- Also working in Blender? → Getting Started with the Blender Add-on →
The plugin is open source — the repo doubles as a reference for building your own integration, and scenes that render differently from your native output are exactly the feedback the beta needs. Report them, or ask anything, in r/OmnibusCloud →.
Let's build the ultracomputer together!