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  • Published 13 Dec 2020

Manual page on "Command Line Rendering" should be clearer and have important info on top

Critical information (command line arguments being positional) required for successfully calling Blender from the command-line is placed at the very bottom of the page.

The rationale behind command line arguments being positional (Blender's ability to render multiple .blend files in sequence) is entirely missing from the manual section on command-line rendering , and I have not seen it elsewhere in the manual either - I had to confirm this via further Google searches.

The information on basic syntax, i.e. "[args] [file] [args...]", does not clearly show that you can push multiple blend files (in fact, it suggests that you can only process one blend file at a time!).

If you happen to have knowledge of the Unix command line flow, positional arguments are not going to be something you jump to - "-o out blend -f 3" should work just as well as "-b blend -o out -f 3", and the user may be suprised and confused when it doesn't.

I remind you that not everyone using Blender is a Blender user. I found all of this confusion when I was asked to render a few projects for someone who was going to have their PC otherwise occupied, and it was not my intention to learn Blender beyond how to call it from cli.

I reached the manual page from Google, and it was not my intention to learn any other switches or options beyond what I needed to have it: render, save the file where indicated, and quit.

Proposition:

  • make the information on Blender supporting multiple blend files in cli mode explicitly clear (use words, not cli mockups) and put it at the top of the page; perhaps make use of techniques to call attention to it as well
  • make the information about positional arguments clearer, and also put it at the top of the page, right below the above explanation (it's currently waaaay down, beyond "Misc", and this is critical information to know if you want to call Blender correctly)
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Development Status: Open

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egonfreeman
13 Dec 2020

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