Blender

Simple Remote Rendering

NetRender was causing problems so I wrote a shell script on my personal server for him to render with. However I downgraded my server and needed to move the process to another server. In this case I wanted to simplify the script to something he can run via screen.

• This was done on Ubuntu Server
• First download blender and install dependancies.

wget https://mirror.clarkson.edu/blender/release/Blender2.90/blender-2.90.1-linux64.tar.xz
tar -xf blender-2.90.1-linux64.tar.xz
apt install libxi6 libxxf86vm1 libxfixes3 libxrender1 libgl1 unzip

• Create directories to work from

mkdir input
mkdir output

• Update bashrc with functions.

function image() {
        ~/blender-2.90.1-linux64/blender -b  $1 -o ~/output/ -F JPEG -f 1
}
function animation() {
        ~/blender-2.90.1-linux64/blender -b  $1 -o ~/output/ -F AVIJPEG -a
}

• At this point you can call the two functions and render away.

NetRender

My son, using an old laptop, has been working hard at learning blender. He now works on more complex scenes and his computers are unable to render quickly on their own. I found out about the netrender addon and wanted to pool together a couple old computers laying around.

The basic structure consists of a

• client
• master
• slave

In this case

• Client = His laptop
• Master = My old laptop with an i5-2520M and 8GB RAM
• Slave = The same laptop as the master, plus maybe his laptop and an old desktop with an inefficient graphics card. There is another old laptop that might help as well.

I read about, and watched youtube videos, on using netrender. But with a clean install of Ubuntu 18.04.1 and blender using the default repositories, the netrender addon was not available. I found that downloading the package from blender.org was the way to go following the instructions here

• Client

mkdir -p build/blender && cd build/blender
wget https://mirror.clarkson.edu/blender/release/Blender2.79/blender-2.79b-linux-glibc219-x86_64.tar.bz2
tar -xf blender-2.79b-linux-glibc219-x86_64.tar.bz2
sudo rm -r /usr/lib/blender/
sudo rm /usr/bin/blender
sudo cp -r blender-2.79b-linux-glibc219-x86_64 /usr/lib/blender
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/blender/blender /usr/bin/blender