Faster batches with Render+ 2.3

Render+ 2.3 is out today! This ver­sion comes with anoth­er impor­tant step towards bet­ter batch rendering.

Parallel Renders

After a mas­sive rewrite of the batch serv­er, Render+ can now ren­der more than one job at a time. The glob­al batch set­tings include a small slid­er to change the num­ber of jobs that get run in parallel.

Render jobs are now start­ed in “groups “at the same time. For instance set­ting parallel render jobs to 2 will run two ren­ders at the same time. Note that can­celling a job will not start the next one imme­di­ate­ly, but it will wait until for the oth­er ren­der jobs in the group to finish. 

This new fea­ture ties in neat­ly with the work in the pre­vi­ous ver­sion. For instance, if you have mul­ti­ple GPUs you now can run a dif­fer­ent ren­der on each one. Though even if you only have one, you choose to spread the jobs on both the GPU and CPU.

Various fixes

The RSS feed fea­ture had some changes as well. Now instead of cre­at­ing a file, the RSS feed is served right from the serv­er. Once the batch starts you can point your brows­er to localhost:7777/batch/rss to see the feed. If you are on a net­work, just replace local­host with the ip of the com­put­er run­ning the batch. Also feeds now include the progress per­cent­age in the title.

This ver­sion also includes fix­es an issue when Blender gets stuck after ren­der­ing. If a ren­der job hits 100% and Blender has­n’t quit, the Blender process gets killed now, so the batch serv­er is able to move on to the next ren­der job.

Finally I’ve low­ered the min­i­mum refresh time for the UI. This is the time R+ waits to poll the batch serv­er. It used to be around 1 sec­ond so it would not over­whelm the serv­er, but it seems like low­er­ing this isn’t affect­ing ren­der­times much.

I’ve low­ered both the min­i­mum and the default val­ue. In prac­tice, this means the progress bar will update much more often instead of jump­ing around. However if you are upgrad­ing, the val­ue will stay at 1 sec­ond or what­ev­er val­ue you had set. You can change this to your lik­ing in the addon preferences.

Smaller releases

Life is a lit­tle hec­tic at the moment, so I’m hop­ing to do short­er ver­sions and release more often. It’s more man­age­able for me, and I think it’s also bet­ter for users that need the new fea­tures fast.

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