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  • Published 11 Jun 2023

More Command Line control

Hi there.

I'm sure I am not alone in the fact that my python skills are borderline non-existent, so I am not able to really know how to fettle with the command line rendering to make it do extra things. But I do use command line rendering all the time as I like to leave work and have stuff running and if I have multiple files that I need for the following day I use a batch file in a powershell (on PC).

I've been rendering this way since 1995 when I was working on TDI Explore. It's really efficient when you have no access to a render farm, but you know your machine can get it done in the hours between 6pm and the following 9am - that 15 hours used well.

But with all the command line rendering, including Maya today, I have used, there has always been a way to set the rendering quality and the rendering resolution.

But not in Blender. I can pick the Scene in a blend file, I can set the frames. I can change the output name and place. What I really want to do, especially around a lunch break, is set off a low quality render of my shots at, say, 1/4 res to see if everything is working nicely, then make adjustments to scenes and set them off at full res. I just don't want to adjust my high quality settings each time I do this.

Put simply, I think it would be great have these in the command line

-x "width" eg. -x 960

-y "height eg. -y 540

-nt "noiseThreshold" eg. -nt 0.1

-mxs "maxSamples" eg. -ms 128

-mns "minSamples" eg. -mns 0

-dn "denoiseBoolean" eg. -dn 1

I did a search but couldn't find anything else like this in the forum, so I thought I'd put it in here.

Anyway, it's something that, I think, would help a lot of people.

Thanks

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 5 Downvote 2
garynoden1
11 Jun 2023

5 Comments

andrej730

I think there are too many parameters that can be important to add them as command line arguments. I think the only viable solution here is to use --python / --python-expr

1
MartynasZiemys

But you can do absolutely anything with command line and Python script. This request makes no sense in my opinion. The functionality is already there. I think, there are so many areas for the devs to spend their time on that would be way more beneficial.

jeroenbakker

Width and height could be supported as these are Blender internal settings. They would be named differently due to our naming scene and already used parameters. -x and -y are already taken. --width and --height would be more descriptive. In this case would you expect the render percentage to be altered as well?

Cycles is implemented as an add-on. This makes it not that standardized to be able to add cycles specific parameters to the command line. What will happen when your using one of the tens of other render engines out there. I know that there are a few options available via the command line ( --cycles-device and --cycles-print-stats ) and could be extended. However, the challenge is to which view-layer the view-layer specific settings will be applied to in a way that it is understandable to for users. And what for cases where you want to use different settings for each view layer.

Nonetheless Blender has the option to change these parameters via the command line via the --python or --python-expr . Render farms use this to override scene and view layer settings for example.

Benefit is that it works for all render engines. Downside is that it requires some knowledge how the render engine you're using is structured. But assuming that you're using the command line tool I would expect that not to be a problem :-)

Omer-Almadani

Setting the quality percent would be fantastic as well.

Lauloque

I too wish the command line rendering offered a bit more options.