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Overview

Summary

The Blender Render Cluster is a Kubernetes example render cluster that can use standard Desktop PCs to run in a render farm with the help of scheduling project called Flamenco.

The overall project goal is to be able to easily add any type of compute nodes to a Flamenco rendering cluster using DevOps best-practises.

Check out this short introduction video or guide on medium.com.

Context

There have been four typical ways of rendering Blender projects:

  1. On your workstation with a nice graphics card.
  2. Custom job scripts that dispatch Blender projects to adhoc group of workstations.
  3. A group of workstations using Flamenco using shared storage.
  4. Online commercial render farms with Pay-As-You-Go compute resources, paywalls etc.

This project is a more standardised way of doing (2) and a more complicated version of (3). The render farm runs Flamenco Workers on a Kubernetes cluster simplifying the maintenance, monitoring and management of the underlying hardware. Even if you have a powerful workstation, this kind of edge-cluster may be a welcome addition and you can still use your workstation to render projects based on how it is configured with Flamenco.

Learn More

Here is an unofficial brief history of Blender rendering landscape from an opensource perspective.

Scripts

Circa ~2012-2022 there have been several attempts to create scripts that send parts of Blender project to more than one rendering workstation. These were usually fire-and-forget or remote-desktop type approaches using NAS.

Then there were scripts and clients built around the inbuilt Blender ‘network renderer’ feature. These were similar to Flamenco, where they replicate the .blend file for a Project across workstations running agents or clients. Then their render output sent to a NAS. This worked for Blender 2.x pre 2020.

The inbuilt ‘network renderer’ feature doesn’t seem to be available in Blender v3+ and those opensource projects all seem to have been stopped in their tracks.

Flamenco v3

Flamenco v3 (circa 2021+) is an opensource solution which is built by Blender Foundation and not only distributes a Blender project to be rendered but also adds some intelligence around Job priority, retries, and logging under one manager with a web-console and a Flamenco Blender Add-On (plugin) on each workstation that wishes to submit Flamenco Jobs.

The other main advantage of Flamenco v3 is its simplicity and “just works out of the box” goal across multiple platforms for end-users with a few computers at home or a small-scale team.

Learn more about common deployment scenarios using Flamenco:

Cloud Rendering?

Hang on… why isn’t this project about a cloud-based cluster? - some thoughts

There are also numerous cloud-rendering solutions springing up each with their own business model. This project is not using cloud-rendering solutions. This project uses Flamenco in a scalable edge-cluster situated in a small office or home environment.

Disclosure

This project is not affiliated with Blender, Flamenco or Kubernetes.