Multi-Machine or Render farm capabilities?

[ChompStudio]

Love the addon, and I would love if there was a way we could use our multiple machines, or a render farm service to render across multiple machines vs trying to manually set frame across all those machines.

Something simple like being able to render all to the same folder with the "place holders" option enabled so that each machine could see what frame was being rendered and move to the next available frame would be absolutely amazing!

If there is any chance of that, or anything I can do to help test or pay for that implementation, just let me know!

Thanks!
Ryan

[Legion245]

@ChompStudio Did you ever find a work around for this. I am currently working on just creating a new add on that can do this using blender background and a launcher script.

[ChompStudio]

@Legion245 Hey there.

No solution, reached out to a couple of different channels for this plugin, but with no real reply. We have been working on big 360 degree animations over the last couple years, and this plugin ( for us at least) is still the best option.....and we are even still using it for a 360 project this month. We tried other paid plugins, but a lot of them are multi-cam setup and SLOOWWWW and really just a huge pain. This is still the best option for ease of use and speed....just has its built in limitations. Our 3d environment renders are also 4-5 mins long, so while we could use cycles, Eevee gets us 90 percent of the way there, and is still faster in the long run.

The current workflow...which isn't great...is to manually break up sequences over our own machines. So a 300 frame animation, 0-99, 100-199, and 200-300 is how we have been doing it. Definitely not the best solution, but its working.

There is also no way to control the naming convention of the frames, so after a render, we have to go and batch re-name the sequence so we make sure not to over-write any of the previous img sequences.

We also were working with FOX render farm there for a little while, because they will add addons to your account so you can use them with their render farm, BUT because of how this plugin starts the rendering process, and has no command prompt support or using Blender's method for rendering, FOX render farm was not able to use this plugin since it would take custom programming, etc.

So with all that being said, if you have a solution I think that would be amazing! And if you need someone for testing, Id be happy to test it out with our current project that we will need to render out this month. Feel free to email me with any questions....hope this helps out a little bit.

Ryan
Ryan@Chompstudio.com
https://www.chompstudio.com