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Creating a Render Job

The Blender Render cluster uses Flamenco and assumes the Flamenco Manager is setup and Add-On configured.

Example Project 1

Assumptions

  1. MacOS is workstation running Blender.
  2. Submitting Flamenco Jobs using the Flamenco Blender Add-On. (setup)
  3. NFS Mount point on MacOS is: /private/nfs/flamenco/output/. (setup)
  4. The Blender Project saved on the NFS file share at /private/nfs/flamenco/projects/example-project-1/.

Add-On Configuration

In the Blender Add-On within the Blender Project…

  • Press the “refresh” button on Add-On to download the supported Blender Job Types from Flamenco Manager.
  • Set Output to PNG
  • Configure the relative Render Output Path
  • Configure the Root Output Path

Render Output Root

The combination of the Render Output Root is used to creat the final destination of the rendered PNGs from the Worker NFS Mount Point. See Setup / NFS documenation for more details with different platform examples (Windows, Linux and MacOS) using Flamenco Two-Way Variables.

The example values below is for MacOS workstation where /private/nfs/flamenco/ is the NFS mount…

Parameter Value
Render Output Root /private/nfs/flamenco/output/example-project-1/
Render Output Path automatically generated by Flamenco Add-On

Flamenco will then append a directory (folder) with the date-time of the Flamenco Render Job.

Baked Simulation Caches

If you have baked some simulations, the path to those has to be identical across all Flamenco platforms. This is not swapped out by Flamenco when a Job is submitted. Essentially, you have to have the same NFS Mount Path across all Flamenco Workers. (see limitations for more details)

Submitting Job

When the Flamenco Job is submitted, the Blender project is transferred to Flamenco Manager and dispatch to the Job Queue. From there it is further dispatches as Tasks to Workers.

When the Job is queued, Flamenco will swap the MacOS NFS Mount point /private/nfs/flamenco with /media/shared/flamenco for the Linux Flamenco Worker.

The path Blender will use to render frame 1 in this example project…

/media/shared/flamenco/output/example-project-1/2023-01-02 22:33:44/00001.png

Note

In the Blender logs, the NFS path will be linux equivalent of the NFS Mount point based on default that is set for that Flamenco platform type.

Chunk Size (frames per Task)

By default, each Worker will work on one frame at a time and each Task by default is one frame.

So for 100 frame project, there will be 100 Tasks in the Job Queue and each Worker will be instructed to work on one frame at a time. This will be a separate Blender execution for each frame. This can be time-consuming if, on startup, Blender has to load a lot of add-ons and resources.

You can request each Worker render more frames per individual Task using a range of Frames by changing the “Chunk Size”.

Failed Frames

If a Worker fails to render a frame (ie: Blender returned an error), then Flamenco assumes trying again on that Worker will fail again. So any retries will be sent to other Workers.