Render+ 2 released

After a long time Render+ 2 is final­ly out. I start­ed work­ing on this ver­sion on September last year, and went into beta around January until now. But the plan­ning for these changes goes back years. I’m real­ly hap­py with this release, the code base and the whole sys­tem have tak­en a leap for­ward in qual­i­ty. These changes pave the way for many more cool fea­tures. And less bugs too (hope­ful­ly :))

This is the first ver­sion for Blender 2.80. The batch pan­el now lives in the new out­put tab, while the ren­der set­tings stayed in the ren­der tab. The UI also got some updates to fit in with the new style. But this is only skin deep, the real work hap­pened under the hood.

Render+ 2 is a full rewrite of the old 1.x series. Many parts of the code were improved, oth­ers mod­ern­ized. The biggest change has been the batch sys­tem, which now uses a serv­er to han­dle the ren­der jobs. The old sys­tem used tem­po­rary files to com­mu­ni­cate with Blender. It was awk­ward and error prone. It was also impos­si­ble to scale up to a net­work since both the addon and Blender had to be on the same computer.

The new batch serv­er now takes com­mands over http (via a REST API). It’s pos­si­ble to imple­ment net­work ren­der­ing now. It’s not done for this ver­sion, but I plan on care­ful­ly imple­ment­ing this over the 2.x series. Another win for the new serv­er is that any­one can write a client for it. You can inte­grate Render+ into any pan­el, or even write your own with any lan­guage that can make http requests (you can even use Curl in the shell!). The API is ful­ly doc­u­ment­ed in the manual.

Many little things too

This ver­sion also packs some new fea­tures, bug fix­es and UI improvements.

• Render jobs now have progress bars and oth­er progress info (only Cycles and Eevee sup­port­ed at the moment)
• You can now can­cel indi­vid­ual ren­der jobs
• Quick Batches for Markers, Cameras and Render Layers now set default out­put paths
• Added a doc­u­men­ta­tion but­ton in the pref­er­ences that points to the local copy of the man­u­al, so you don’t need to be online to read it
• Previous Batch mode now includes batch start­ed and fin­ished date, as well as total ren­der time and job sta­tis­tics (aver­age, fastest, slowest)
• Added an option to print debug mes­sages to the con­sole (instead of a file)
• Added an option to dis­able over­writ­ing ren­der files in batches
• Render+ can now run cus­tom com­mands and scripts before and after run­ning a batch, as well as before and after run­ning ren­der jobs
• Power off, noti­fi­ca­tions and actions for batch­es are sep­a­rat­ed from the gen­er­al settings
• Email noti­fi­ca­tions now include batch stats: aver­age time, slow­est and fastest job
• Global per­cent­age for batch­es can now be set high­er than 100%
• Fixed blank out­put paths. Now they take the path from the job scene
• Fixed dupli­cat­ed out­put paths accu­mu­lat­ing "_00x" at the end of the file

Also, some things were removed as they are no longer use­ful in Blender 2.80 (RIP):

• The ren­der slots menu. Blender now sup­ports named slots, and you can have as many as you want. Check out the N‑Panel when look­ing at a Render in the image editor.
• OpenGL ren­der­ing is old news. Now we have Eevee and the Workbench ren­der engine.
• Custom CSS for RSS files are gone too. I used these to cre­ate a poor-man’s web pan­el. But now we can have actu­al web clients.

Render+ 2 is also avail­able on Gumroad now!