BlendNet

Preferences with BlendNet parameters and info Sent task to Manager and continue to work Switch to second task with opened preview window
Couple of screenshots

Description

Opensource Blender addon and distributed cloud rendering system.

Authors

  • Idea & realization: Rabit

Usage

Please check out the wiki page: Wiki

Requirements

  • Blender >= 2.80
  • GCP Provider: Google Cloud Platform project and google cloud sdk
  • AWS Provider: Amazon Web Services account and aws cli v2
  • Local Provider: no reqs

Purpose

Existing blender addons, that enabling network rendering on a cluster of instances are too complicated, not enough automated or too expensive. The solution is just to use the existing cloud providers with their cheap preemptible instances costs ~3 times less than the regular ones.

For example GCP n1-highcpu-64 (64 core 57.6GB RAM) will cost you just $0.48 per hour. Just imagine this - a quite complicated Cycles engine frame will cost just $0.50.

Overview

The system consists of 3 main parts:

  • Addon - blender interface to simplify run and manage the tasks
  • Manager - controls Agents, merges results, provides status to Addon
  • Agent - worker of the system, rendering task, provides status to Manager

All the components are using HTTPS & Basic Auth to protect the connection.

Read more on the GitHub page: README

Features

  • Dynamic preview - user can see the progress of rendering, picture updated every 5s (default)
  • Non-destructive preview engine - you can close preview and open it again without interrupting
  • Allow to create providers - right now supported local run & GCP
  • Saves your money - if some resources are not needed right now - they will be terminated

Plans

You can see all the feature requests/bugs on the github page:

Tasks

  • Use buckets to cache dependencies/results
  • Cost estimation before rendering
  • Distributed smoke baking (per-domain): it’s hard to bake multiple domains - it requires one domain per bake, others should be turned off
  • Allocating of preemptible GPU on the instances
  • Detailed statistics to optimize the pipeline
  • Simplify the setup process for the end-user
  • Web interface to check the status

OpenSource

This is an experimental project. The main goal is to test State of the Art philosophy in practice.

We would love to see independent developers working on the project’s issues: for fun and interest as well as for monetary compensation (say, attached to the tickets).

License

The repository and its contents are covered by Apache v2.0, so anyone can use it without any concerns.

If you have any changes you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to make a pull-request and push them into the original repository. Definitely no pressure though.

Build

There is no need to build the project, just download zip archive with the latest release from GitHub and install the addon using Blender add-on installer.

Privacy policy

It’s very important to save user private data and you can be sure: we are working on security of our applications and improving it every day. No data could be sent somewhere without user notification and his direct approval. This application is using network connection as minimum as possible to perform only the operations of its main purpose. All the connections are secured by the wide using open standards. Any internet connection will not be allowed to collect any user personal data anyway.

Updated: