Hi guys,
I am trying to create a cloud render farm for Blender (because there is never enough render power!) and I have a few questions on how Blender works. I have a solid background in distributed and cloud computing, but I am still new to 3D rendering and Blender specifically. The few questions that I have are below. If it’s too much for an email, perhaps there is someone who is willing to get on skype/hangouts with me to help with these? I would be extremely grateful! (happy to pay for your time too). Thanks a lot! Questions: 1) I saw 'do not run scripts' in blender options. Does it mean the rendering process would need to run some arbitrary code injected into the blender file? Are scripts commonly used? If we do not support it on the farm would it turn off a lot of people? 2) I want to check files uploaded to my renderer before putting them into queue. I figured I can do it by running: blender -b filename.blender -P myScr.py Can I assume, that if myScr.py was run by blender, that the file is ok (more or less)? Generally, what is the best way to check most of file's parameters before launching computation-heavy rendering? 3) Does the packed blender file contain everything needed to render? What’s the best way for the user to upload data to the farm? A packed blend file? Or is it better to let them compress everything into one archive? 4) Are all render settings already stored in the file? Is there something that can’t be included in the file, that I’d need to ask about before starting the render? I see that I can specify output size, pick frames and so on from the command line - but aren’t they already stored in the blender file? Network rendering 5) I noticed (using wireshark) that the master starts an http server and accepts POSTs with json commands from clients. These commands contain local (to client) paths to files. So how does the client send these files to master? Seems like no other data is transferred with HTTP. Did I miss something? 6) I really like the idea of the network renderer, but right now it uses network discovery and doesn’t have any authentication, so I can’t really use it for my cloud farm. It seems like minor improvements can be done in order to create a standard protocol and allow to push user tasks to any farm (assuming the farm provides the user with some URL like https://my.farm.io/ and username and password). It seems like the only other solution currently if each farm writes their own blender plugin. Is there someone I can talk about network renderer? Perhaps, I can even contribute. -- Regards, Andrey _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
