How many Softimage licenses do you need for an Arnold render farm?


None, not for the render farm itself. You just need Arnold licenses for the render nodes. You need Softimage licenses for artist workstations; on the render nodes, you’ll be using xsibatch -processing -render to render (and -processing doesn’t take a Batch license for third-party renderers).

You wouldn’t need Maya Batch licenses for Arnold render nodes either. The Maya render/mayabatch command line tools won’t take a Batch license for third-party renderers either.