Blender Parallel Render Farm
Blender is an open-source rendering package often used for developing assets and animations for Movies, TV and Videogames.
Running Blender on Nebula
A Nebula allocation is required to use Blender on Nebula. See How to apply for Visualisation Services for more information.
Follow the guide on booking and starting a Nebula session.
Blender is available as a desktop icon or by double clicking a .blend file to open it in the current supported version of Blender.
Parallelisation of Blender Rendering Using Flamenco
Flamenco is an open-source render-farm manager maintained by the Blender Foundation.
Job status can be checked using a web UI at https://flamenco.Pawsey.org.au.
We have implemented Flamenco on Nebula, allowing users to run rendering jobs on all un-booked nodes.
Submitting Flamenco Jobs
First, in Blender, enable the flamenco plugin in Edit -> Preferences -> Add-ons -> Flamenco
The server address of https://flamenco.Pawsey.org.au should be pre-filled.
Set your frame range and chunk size and what renderer to use. Flamenco can also produce a video of the rendered frames.
Chunk Size
Chunk size is the number of frames in each task. In order to get efficient parallelisation, you want to have enough tasks to spread across all available nodes. Expect your job to run on 10-15 nodes so for a render job of 1000 frames a chunk size of around 10 would be good.
Submit the job to Flamenco.
Geometry Nodes
If you are using any geometry nodes that require simulation or any plugins that use simulation nodes such as Molecular Nodes, then you need to bake your nodes before submitting the job to Flamenco.
Retrieving Flamenco Render Output
The completed render files will be available in your home drive under “Flamenco Renders”