License Server Guide

If you downloaded the free package, you can start to use 3Delight immediately after the installation.

On the other hand, if you have purchased one or more licenses, follow the steps below to complete your installation. Note that the free package cannot be used with a purchased license.

1. Obtaining a License Key
2. Activating a License Key

How 3Delight Licensing Works

3Delight licenses are related to threads or processes and are bound to a machine. So a quad-core license offers the following unique flexibility on a given machine: 

• Run a single render with the four cores working in parallel on a single image.
• Run two independent renders (working on two separate images), each one using up to two cores.
• Run four different renders, each one using one core working on 4 separate images.

Using an unlimited multi-core license offers the same king of flexibility but with no limitation on how many threads or separate processes that can be launched. For an example, on a single 8 cores machine one can:

• Run a single render with the 8 or even 10 or more threads working in parallel on a single image.
• Run 8 (or more) independent renders (working on different images), each one using one or more threads.

All these scenarios are independent on how many CPUs are available on the given machine. In practice, to fully use a dual-CPU / dual-core machine, one need a quad-core license. Also as a practical note for the unlimited multi-core license, even if running more threads than the number of available cores can sometime provide a small incremental gain in performance, there is a limit to the gain one can achieve this way.

As a reminder, all licenses are floating; they can be used by any machine in a network. They are also platform independent.