Online LEGO Rendering with Mecabricks (and Blender!)

Hello,

I am editing Mecabricks.com that I have been working on for the past 6 years. This is an online CAD software for LEGO models and obviously, Blender has been my 3D tool from the beginning. In the past couple of years, I developed multiple version of scripts and then Add-ons for Blender to export models from Mecabricks and import them in Blender to be rendered. That worked great but I decided to go to the next level which is to render directly from the website. My intent is to make it accessible to everybody even without any 3D knowledge. So 2 months ago I decided to build a small render farm and design the software to control Blender in the background.

My rig is based on 6 computers including 6 Ryzen 1600 (72 threads) and 5 GTX1050TI. I use the daily build of Blender 2.79 as it provides the possibility to have CPU and GPU rendering on the same machine.

Here are a couple pictures. I designed the case myself and got it laser cut:

The next step was to make the custom software to control it. I decided to use Python for server and clients and a MySQL database. This database is the link between the Apache server and the farm. I am currently only dealing with still images and therefore I optimised it for this purpose. Here is a picture of the GUIs:

https://i.imgur.com/xFpjo9q.jpg

Finally the last step was to link it to the Mecabricks webapp and generate the Blend files on the fly using the user defined settings. This is now possible to render models without anything else than the browser. It even works on an iPad. Here is a short video that shows how it is used:

This is the first week that it is tested and the service is not open all the time however, it is more than usable and actually quite fast. It generally takes less than 2 minutes for an HD image and less than 10 for a 4K. The current options are still limited but I plan to add way more - compositing, Dof, etc.

If you want to test it, head to https://www.mecabricks.com/en/workshop
You will just need to create a free account and select “3D rendering” in the top left menu. You have thousands of models in the library to test it with.

Enjoy

This is really amazing, you have done a fantastic job on every aspect of this project. :slight_smile: Keep up the amazing work

If you want help setting up an extremely optimized cycles scene for rendering PM me. Have a few things that could cut your render times in half and removing noise all together without denoising

Thank you. I will certainly PM you in the new year about this. I still have in mind your crazy 640 threads rendering video! xmas holidays start tomorrow and being in New Zealand I’ll spend more time at the beach than in front the computer :wink: But I will be back into it in January.

Absolutely great job! My kids have me model their lego creations all the time. This might be the perfect opportunity for them to do it for themselves, and maybe even open the door to 3D modeling in general.

Very cool, I know some kids that would love this. Great Job!!!

Update…

Just let my seven year old son have a go at it and he loved it! I showed him the basic commands for navigating and manipulating parts and he picked it right up. Again, amazing job on this!

Thank you :slight_smile: It is how I intended it to be: easy.

Project is now online with more options added - Depth of Field, compositing, etc.

Here are two images. The first one is the rendering mode in Mecabricks and the second one is the image rendered. Took 1min20 to render (1800x1080 @200 samples).

https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4764/27903323879_c27b505530_b.jpg
Mecabricks Render Tool by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr

https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4623/39681653281_9ff2533518_b.jpg
Mecabricks render farm: AT-RT by Nicolas Jarraud, on Flickr