Render+ 2.5 released

It’s that time of the year again! A new Render+ release is out with some new fea­tures, some life qual­i­ty improve­ments and a bunch of bug fixes.

Verison 2.5 brings mul­ti­ple cus­tom frames, frame jump con­trol for ani­ma­tions, bet­ter tools for trou­bleshoot­ing, sup­port for Blendfiles com­pressed with Zstd (Blender 3), and a new option to run a python script (from the blend­file) before ren­der­ing. There’s also a com­plete rewrite of the code to avoid over­writ­ing files and a rewrite of the entire par­al­lel ren­der­ing loop, mov­ing from Multiprocessing to Concurrent Futures, which has shown to be sim­pler and more reliable.

Finally, for Windows users there’s the option to write a .bat file to run the batch with­out the batch serv­er. So in cas­es where the serv­er is too heavy, or there’s some oth­er issue you can gen­er­ate a script and still be able to ren­der. I will be adding sup­port for Mac and Linux soon (it was more urgent for Windows users TBH).

Full Changelog

• New frame jump set­ting for ani­ma­tions. Let’s you con­trol how many frames to move for­ward after ren­der­ing a frame in an animation
• The still frame option now accepts mul­ti­ple frames sep­a­rat­ed by com­mas like 1,2,4,6. It also accepts frames rel­a­tive to the end and start (+2 or -1). Also sup­ports ren­der­ing mul­ti­ple ani­ma­tion ranges (2..10)
• Removed usages of with_stem() so it’s still pos­si­ble to run Render+ on Blender 2.79
• Fixed pow­er off in batches
• Rewrote the entire func­tion to avoid over­writes, now it’s eas­i­er to debug and works more reliably
• Rewrote the entire par­al­lel ren­der code. Now it uses con­cur­rent futures instead of mul­ti­pro­cess­ing.
  Now it’s more reli­able and less hacky.
• Render+ will now cor­rect­ly mark ren­der jobs as fin­ished when the Blender instance quits
• New option in Global Settings to dis­able all addons when ren­der­ing. Useful for troubleshooting
• Replaced all the old blend­file code with the new one from BAT. Now Render+ can read blend­files com­pressed with Blender 3+ (using Zstd).
• Option to run a Python script before run­ning each ren­der­job. The script must be inside Blender
• Improved debug prints
• Fixed a crash when enabling “Use ter­mi­nal” on Windows
• Fixed Mac’s Finder some­times not open­ing the out­put path

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.