Render Queue mode
Problem:
Currently if you want to render efficiently, the best way is to render from the command prompt. However, this can be daunting to users inexperienced with the CMD prompt and is also a little labourious.
Solution:
On started up, along side options like: General, 2D Animation, Sculpting, VFX, and Video Editing. There is a 'Render' mode. Instead of opening the main application, this opens a bare-bones render queue. Renders can either be added though the Browser window, or they can be added as an option from the 'Render' drop-down in the main application setting - Something like 'Add to Render Queue'.
You can add multiple files to the render Queue before starting your renders.
Items in the Queue could have a flag for:
- Use project render settings.
And if that is set to false there can be options for:
- Render engine type (Cycles or Eevee).
- Render path
- Start Frame
- End Frame
- Render Name
- Number of Threads
- Frame number to render - if single frame.
- Frames per second.
- Low quality render.
Additionally, it would be good to be able to save render settings.
Advanced option for the future is for a pipeline. So if you have a render farm with multiple users, several computers can connect to the Render Farm and add their renders to the Queue, which can then be manually prioritised in the Queue list.
3 Comments
Yes, you are right. I proposed a Take system similar to what is in Cinema 4D, which could be very powerful together with a render queue. Let's hope that both features will be eventually implemented.
I think Flamenco or any render management tool from a render farm could be a more appropriate answer here. Even when rendering alone on a single machine.
Plus what would be the point of opening up Blender if you want efficiency in rendering.
Flamenco or any other render management software is additional software users may not like to install or learn how to use, additionally it comes with a bunch of research overhead on what management software to uses. So it would indeed be great if the blender GUI would offer a feature to create a render queue for headless (no GUI) rendering.
A quick implementation would be to just generate the command line prompt based on a selection of blend files and execute that prompt. It will still be efficient because the most expensive part is all the loaded scene data in the UI and render preview. Here the main blender instance will only dispatch the headless blender instances without actually loading any files.