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Blender and GNU Parallel

7

Skororu shares a Unix tip for distributing rendering work without using render farm software.

As an alternative to using render farm management software, there is a quick and easy way to perform distributed renders from the command line.

GNU Parallel [1] is a general purpose utility for running jobs in parallel on one or more computers. It runs on most unix-like operating systems including macOS and Linux, but it should be possible to use it on Windows via a Linux Virtual Machine [2]. We can use GNU Parallel to distribute rendering workload - either animations or single frames - over multiple computers with just a couple of lines of code.

For example, assuming a .blend file with all resources packed and set to 2000 samples: the first line would distribute a single frame render across 2 computers as 20 chunks of 100 samples, transferring files as required (no need for a shared filesystem), and will tidy up after itself as it goes. The second line uses ImageMagick [3] to combine the chunks to form the final 2000 sample image:

seq 1 20 | parallel -S1/[email protected],1/[email protected] --progress --plus --basefile render.blend --return 1_{#}.exr --cleanup blender -b render.blend -o \"#\"_{#} -F EXR -f 1 -- --cycles-resumable-num-chunks {##} --cycles-resumable-current-chunk {#} > /dev/null

convert 1_*.exr -evaluate-sequence mean final.exr

Some basic SSH configuration may be required, and this is covered in the documentation given here [4].

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/
[2] https://www.virtualbox.org
[3] https://imagemagick.org/script/convert.php
[4] https://gitlab.com/skororu/scripts

7 Comments

    • I did a quick test run, and it worked well; just set the Blender file to output 16-bit PNGs and run the following, changing the settings to suit your network and number of chunks:

      seq 1 20 | parallel -S1/[email protected],1/[email protected] --progress --plus --basefile render.blend --return 1_{#}.png --cleanup blender -b render.blend -o \"#\"_{#} -f 1 -- --cycles-resumable-num-chunks {##} --cycles-resumable-current-chunk {#} "> /dev/null 2>&1"

      convert 1_*.png -evaluate-sequence mean final.png

      The process should be independent of the rendering method. As long as your machines are all using GPU rendering, and that's set in the file config, I would expect it to work.

  1. So far:
    -2x PC with ubuntu 14.04 (with password-less openssh)
    -each node/PC with nvidia GTX (560ti and 970 oc)
    -latest updates (apt-get update, apt-get upgrade)
    -latest parallel on one primary node/PC [ (wget -O - pi.dk/3 || curl pi.dk/3/ || fetch -o - http://pi.dk/3) | bash ]
    -I did not install parallel on second PC

    The GPU is only used on primary node/PC (with gtx970), on second node the GPU is not active during render time - only CPU.

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