coderme / blensible

Ansible playbook to speed up Blender 3D movies rendering, by distributing frames rendering within a farm of servers.

Blensible

• An "Ansible" playbook to distribute Blender 3D movies frames rendering fairly between all servers in your "rendering_farm" group.

Features

• Fair distribution of frames rendering on all servers in rendering_farm.
• Add as many servers as you want to speed up rendering.
• Support Debian (and its derivatives), OpenBSD and FreeBSD as rendering servers.

Usage

• Setup connections settings under [rendering_farm] group in the inventory file named hosts
• Setup preferred settings in group_vars/rendering_farm supported variables as follow:
  • blended_file : Local path to the .blend file, that is the file to be rendered.
  • frames_count : Total frames count
  • threads : Number of cpu cores used for rendering.
  • output_format : Output format, default to PNG.
  • render_directory : Working directory to store rendered frames.
  • dest_directory : Local directory to get gather all rendered frames
• Finally run ansible-playbook -i hosts run.yaml

Limitation

• Number of servers should be less or equal the number of frames in your 3D movie.
• Rendering of any single frame at any time handled ONLY by one server.