Saving money when rendering overnight in Blender
AddictedToCG writes:
In this video you will learn how to save a couple of bucks when rendering overnight!
We will do that by using an addon called alarm and shutdown made by Surgesster. It is a very simple tutorial really and doesn’t require match effort. So I though that it would have been nice to share with you guys my thoughts on this addon and why I use it so extensively as I am rendering overnight quite often and most of the times it is just 10 mins left before it’s done and I have to go to school so I end up wasting a ton of money to wasted energy. So some of you may find themselves able to relate to this scenario. So that’s basically all this “Saving money when rendering overnight in Blender!” really is. Just a simple quick little tip.
https://youtu.be/dnLqdjAiq_A
There is no need to use this addon. In Windows, just open the notepad and paste this example code and save it as a *.bat file. It will render files or scenes and then shutdown itself when it is done. Voila! It is called command line rendering.
set path=C:\Program files\blender-2.77a-windows64
CALL “%path%\blender” -b test01.blend -o //RENDER\TAKE_01\take_01_#### -F PNG -x 1 -a ^
test02.blend -o //RENDER\TAKE_02\take_02_#### -F PNG -x 1 -a ^
test03.blend -o //RENDER\TAKE_03\take_03_#### -F PNG -x 1 -a
shutdown -s -t 00
Of course you can achieve many things from the command line, but the point of an add-on is to add a layer of user-friendliness.
I’m a big fan of using batch files for unattended rendering of discontinuous sets of frames – I had one running all this weekend at work. But many younger users will never have seen or used a command window, so DOS and batch commands like those above are as alien as a programming language for many modern users.
Actually I really like the command line as well and I think that it can be really powerful in a lot of cases. Especially for businesses and / or studios as it provides a lot of options. Nevertheless it may sometimes be hard for a newcomer to write batch programs on the command line. A simple addon such as this one can eliminate this issue and help those people get along much easier.