Fast F12 by super3boy is a batch renderer for Blender jobs, which can come in handy if you have to render a set of files while away from your computer. It's Windows only, but I imagine the concept is easy enough to be implemented on other platforms as well.
Super3boy writes:
My program utilizes the blender run parameters to provide easy background rendering with a simple interface. It will really come in handy when you want to render out a bunch projects while you are away from your computer, and they will render in order from a list until complete. The next step to this is a distributed render app, which I hope to complete in a few weeks if I have time. Please follow the blog of you would like to keep up to date on my progress. Below is additional information on the project, and a download link.
Link
12 Comments
Sounds great. I might give it a try!
Yay! Good call! This should come in handy!
Looks neat. I have really found some of super3boy's tutorials to be helpful in the past, and having a render queue on hand could be quite useful. Thanx!
Just what I need - a GUI for the Blender command line. Beats my master-batch-file-calls-several-other-batch-files method for sequentially rendering different animations.
When it comes to Blender, never is there an excuse for Win-only other than the developer is a Windows chode. Fast F12 = Fail.
@John S.: really? And why would that be? Why would *any* developer who creates something for himself be forced to do it for all platforms that support Blender, even if he himself doesn't even use these platforms? You're just trolling.
I totally agree with you bart, Lets clarify, this is one person developing something, using apps he feels comfortable for HIMSELF.
He owes you nothing John S. I also will presume it is also free (just an assumption). In which case you're fail.
I have a "farm" program written in VB (by myself) for using unconnected PCs to share the workload of an animation. It takes reference render times for all your PCs, then tells you how many frames of an animation to allocate to each PC, based on the PC's speeds. If you feed the program a list of existing frame times from a previous render (i.e. the Blender console output), it bases its calculations on the actual times and becomes even more accurate. It's very useful... but will never be released for Linux, Mac or anything else, because I'm an amateur programmer and don't know the first thing about Linux, Mac or other OSs.
Nice work! Thanks for sharing. I'm writing a renderer and platform independent distributed controller as well. Planning to share it when it's more complete.
Thanks for all the great feedback guys. Don't forget to leave feature requests and error reports as I am still in active development of this app.
As for the cross development comment, I am still thinking about it because I have gotten a few requests since the release last night. This app was really just a plane ride + weekend project so its still very much the the early stages. It was made in C#.NET and I don't have any experience in Mono(the cross platform .net framework) to make it run on Linux and Mac. If anyone had experience on that, and would like to help me please let me know.
Keep tuned because I will be releasing a new version next week with some extra features, and hope to have a distributed rendering app in a few weeks. Please also follow the development blog because I am currently recording a small info video on using the program with some tips and tricks that will be up at exactly 12:00 tonight.
Hey super3boy,
That looks excellent. Reminds me of the old BFR2 (Blender File Renderer 2), though this already looks a bit nicer. If you want to have a look at what they did: http://misc.macouno.com/index.php?file=BFR2_Setup.zip
One thing that would be really nice, and I don't know if you have this or not. I have always had trouble with BFR2 because it didn't allow for spaces in directory names.
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