Easy batch rendering with Render+ 2.2

Watch out! A new ver­sion of Render+ is out. We final­ly take the first step towards net­work ren­der­ing and many improve­ments all around.

Network rendering

The batch serv­er can now be run in a sep­a­rate com­put­er. For now, the serv­er also does the ren­der­ing. I will be work­ing on dis­trib­uted ren­der­ing over future releas­es. Please refer to the API sec­tion of the docs to set this up. Don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact me if you need any help or find any issues.

Better custom overrides

Custom over­rides now sup­port pre­sets so you can save use­ful over­rides. It also comes with bun­dles with 4 pre­sets to get start­ed. Also over­rides no longer auto-include bpy.data.scenes[SCENE], you will have to include this man­u­al­ly now. This lets you over­ride oth­er parts of the blend file that aren’t in the scene.

Better GPU Selection

GPU selec­tion for Cycles is more reli­able now. You can pick a spe­cif­ic GPU for ren­der­ing. This is lay­ing some ground work for par­al­lel batch jobs in the next ver­sion. I would real­ly appre­ci­ate your help on test­ing this if you have more than one GPU, since I only have one and haven’t been able to test this properly.

And more! You can now dis­able the miss­ing images check. Some peo­ple also report­ed issues with long ren­ders where the addon though the serv­er (or Blender) had froze and killed it. There’s now a set­ting to con­trol that (Server Stuck Threshold) and the default is much high­er than before. Plus lots of bug­fix­es and code cleanups

Tentative roadmap for the next version

• Video tuto­ri­als. Finally 🙂
• Generate scripts from batch­es. Writes a sin­gle file that you can run from the shell with­out using the batch serv­er (with­out most of the fea­tures of Render+ though)
• Change batch­es while run­ning. Render+ would let you mod­i­fy a ren­der job that has­n’t been start­ed yet
• Surprise small­er fea­tures (com­ing from your suggestions!)

Again, I’d like to thank every­one who sup­ports my work. Render+ would­n’t have made it this far with­out your help!

You can grab the update from the Blender Market or Gumroad as usual.