CURRENTLY, THERE ARE BUILDS FOR WINDOWS AND UBUNTU (BOTH 64 BITS) AVAILABLE. IF YOU WANT TO BUY B-RENDERON BUT ARE ON A DIFFERENT PLATFORM/LINUX DISTRIBUTION, PLEASE CHECK WITH ME VIA P.M. FIRST. THANKS.
Why I created it?
I work every day at a small animation studio, using Blender (among other software), and then I come home and use Blender some more for personal projects. Both at my job and at home, I found that I, and the other animators I work with, were relying more and more on command line scripts to render, both because of performance improvement (i.e. less memory consumption, less rendering-crashes with some add-ons, and generally faster renders) and because we often times need to leave multiple blend files to render overnight or over the weekend.
But writing command line scripts can be quite tedious and error prone (typing errors are often times lead to a render missed). That’s why I developed B-Renderon, a standalone program with a nice and handy graphical interface to render multiple blend files from command line, without bothering with (or even seeing, unless you want to) the command line.
While developing it, several ideas came to mind to expand and improve upon it, and it ended up being something definitely cooler and more useful than I had envisioned.
Who can benefit from it?
In my opinion, pretty much everyone using Blender on the supported platforms, and making renders with it, would benefit from using B-Renderon. In my experience, once you have adopted a tool like B-Renderon in your rendering workflow, it ranges from being handy to feeling indispensable, depending on the projects you are dealing with. Simply dragging and dropping a bunch of blends onto B-Renderon, hitting render, and coming the next day to see them all rendered is just satisfying. And the flexibility of being able to easily batch render blends scenes / cameras / viewlayers or different blends with different blender versions, or to quickly set up different frame ranges and render them, to name a few, turns tedious processes into a breeze. It can also help immensely in systems with multiple GPUs, to speed up rendering using different gpu’s in parallel instances rendering different frames at the same time.
Features
Supports Drag and drop of blend files to add them into the queue and to reorder them
Has a per-file mode option to either render as animation or to enter a list of frames to be rendered
Allows you to set different versions of Blender to render different files in your queue.
Allows you to choose which scene(s), viewlayer(s), and camera(s) to use for each job.
Allows you to set the frame range to be rendered, with a convenience feature to split the range into different jobs in the queue.
Supports interrupting rendering and resuming it later, automatically starting from the frame after the last saved one
Allows you to have different named queues and quickly switch between them
Stores a log file for each queue with useful information such as Start and End time and date of every render, average rendering time per frame, total queue processing time, scene name and amount of rendered frames for each job.
Can show, during rendering, Blender’s live log / console
You can easily open any blend in your queue with the appropriate blender version, open the blend path, open the output path.
Allows you to add extra command-line arguments, in case you want to, for example, change the render engine, resolution, execute a python command, etc.
Allows you to choose external blender rendering scripts to manage the rendering of each blend. For example, if you have a script that renders different stills for all the cameras in your scene, you can choose that script to be used with the blends you add to the queue.
Includes option to shutdown the pc after all renders are completed. (Notice that in some linux systems, this option requires B-renderon to be run with priviledges in order to work).
During rendering, the STOP button has a context menu with options to stop after the current item in the queue is completed or after the current frame is saved.
For Cycles rendering, it allows you to assign different devices for different items in the queue. (This option works with Blender 2.82 or newer), with an option to “distribute” the selected devices among the selected jobs, which combined with the setting to use multiple parallel blender instances to render and the extra arguments preset to turn overwrites off and placeholders on, is very useful for systems with multiple gpu’s to render a different frame at a time with each gpu in parallel, which can be much faster than using all of them for each frame.
Includes a simple image viewer to quickly preview renders.
Scheduller to optionally set automatic render start and or end times.
Option to render multiple items of the queue in parallel
Read blend’s camera and choose which ones to use for rendering
Read blend’s viewlayer and choose which ones to use for rendering
Set output paths and filenames with tokens / wildcards. Including presets
Ability to choose folders as “watchfolders” so any new blend files that get added to those folders get automatically picked up by b-renderon and rendered
Option in the settings to automatically detect failed renders (i. e. blender crashes, or runs out of gpu memory, etc) and try to resume them.
Statusbar with relevant info of the selected job, such as average rendering time per frame, estimated time remaining, total rendering time for already completed jobs, etc.