Render+ 3.0 released

Today I’m releas­ing not only a new ver­sion of Render+, but a major new ver­sion at that.

This includes a few long request­ed changes, updates to fit in more with mod­ern Blender and improve­ments to the back­end. Also a lot of refac­tor­ing and clean­ing up. Let’s take a look at what’s new for Render+ 3.0.

New UI using the Blender subpanel system

The old Render+ UI was made in the Blender 2.7x days. Long before we had col­lapsi­ble sub­pan­els. It had fake tabs using an enum prop­er­ty with the “expand” option. A pop­u­lar trick back then. Subpanels bring the advan­tage of being able to check all set­tings in one go. Or some of them, or hide all of them except one. This also opens up key­board short­cuts and every trick that can be done with pan­els (and not with fake tabs).

New quick batches

The quick batch­es sys­tem has been com­plete­ly redesigned. Now you can com­bine mul­ti­ple cri­te­ria to gen­er­ate batch­es. For instance you can select a spe­cif­ic scene with all cam­eras, or a spe­cif­ic world for two or three scenes, or all worlds for all scenes, or two worlds for three cameras.

The last exam­ple would gen­er­ate 6 ren­der jobs. One for each world and each cam­era.
These can also be com­bined with large ren­ders, and mark­ers. The gen­er­at­ed ren­der jobs can now be marked as ani­ma­tions, and there’s a tem­plate sys­tem to define what their out­put paths will be.

New tool to change settings in multiple render jobs at once

Render+ already had a tool to change out­put paths for all ren­der jobs in one go. Now, 3.0 comes with a new tool to copy mul­ti­ple prop­er­ties to all ren­der jobs at the same time.
You can now set­up a sin­gle ren­der job and then copy those set­tings to all the oth­ers (for instance, cus­tom frame, file for­mat, cam­era, etc.)

Option to enable/disable render passes

You can now set­up ren­der pass­es for each ren­der job. Each of these pass­es has its own out­put path and depends on the run­ning engine. Only Cycles and Eevee are ful­ly sup­port­ed at the moment.

Render+ will cre­ate a node set­up in the com­pos­i­tor while ren­der­ing with the file out­put node, auto­mat­i­cal­ly enabling ren­der pass­es, the com­pos­i­tor, as well as set­ting the nodes and every­thing need­ed to get the file.

New custom overrides UI (easier)

Custom Overrides allow you to change any prop­er­ty of any­thing in the scene for a par­tic­u­lar ren­der job. An exam­ple would be to make a light a dif­fer­ent col­or, or change the mate­r­i­al of an object. We have had cus­tom over­rides for a long time, but as pow­er­ful as they were they still required some Python knowl­edge and were not acce­si­ble to all users.

The new cus­tom over­rides pan­el now offers options to eas­i­ly pick com­mon dat­a­blocks and their prop­er­ties. You can select between objects, cam­eras, lights and col­lec­tions. When pick­ing one of these you can then select the prop­er­ty to change. For instance, an object would give you the choice of chang­ing vis­i­bil­i­ty, loca­tion, rota­tion and scale.

Writing entire­ly cus­tom over­rides is also still pos­si­ble. It’s also pos­si­ble to mix both, for instance you can pick an object but use a cus­tom data­path instead of the options pro­vid­ed by the ui. If you have some Python skills and want to know what Render+ is going to do, you can tog­gle the code preview

The server can now have workers that receive render jobs

A long, long, loooong request­ed fea­ture is to have the serv­er “bal­ance” ren­der jobs between mul­ti­ple com­put­ers. This can be done now when the serv­er being run over a net­work (not using the “this com­put­er” option in batch settings).

Setting this up is quite sim­ple. Just run the batch serv­er on all com­put­ers that will take ren­der jobs. Take note of their IP address or host­names. Next, decide which one is going to be the “main” serv­er (which receives jobs from the addon). Set the oth­er servers as “work­ers” in the con­fig­u­ra­tion file of this main server

Check out the doc­u­men­ta­tion for more info

Configuration file for the render server (TOML)

Servers now have sev­er­al options, so using com­mand-line argu­ments for every­thing isn’t prac­ti­cal any­more. The batch serv­er now takes con­fig­u­ra­tion files in TOML for­mat (same as Blender’s addon man­i­fest files).

Render+ includes a sam­ple con­fig­u­ra­tion file and the docs have more info on the prop­er­ties that can be set through them.

Other fixes and improvements:

•  Use sys­tems temp fold­er in Blender +4.2
•  Fix bug when ren­der­ing with EXR in Blender +4.1
•  Fix bug when using cam­era mark­ers quick batches
•  Fix and sim­pli­fy the removal of frame num­bers on still renders
•  Better logging
•  Now using the new Progress Bar in 4.1 (instead of the old float slid­er hack)
•  Cleaned up and refac­tored a lot of ancient code.
•  Make sure batch is fin­ished before run­ning pow­er off options
•  Launch scripts for serv­er now look for the path appropiately

You can grab the update from SuperHive or Gumroad as usual.