By the way, for Linux users of B-renderon, I’m testing a new way to ship it for (AppImage). There’s a build available already. If anyone tests it please let me know how it goes!
Hey C, I’m still loving my B-R more than ever! And I still command all pros and serious Blender users to buy B-Renderon!!!
So I built a new workstation in the Fall, and then I had months of app dev work but now have a ton of new animation work and need to get my rendering situation optimized for maximum efficiency. Maybe you can help me figure out the best way to render my animations with my current setup…
The Beast: Ryzen 9 9950X3D in a Gigabyte X870E Aorus Elite Wifi7 with 32GB DDR5 RAM. (Micro Center did not have any 64GB DDR5 the day I bought all my crap and figured I’d pick up more later… My 32GB G.Skill was $85 in September and now is an eye-watering, pants-shitting $449!!!). Two RTX 5070Ti, one on mobo and the other in a Razer Core X V2 eGPU enclosure using Thunderbolt 4 (sadly, mobo does not have TB5). Rendered frames drive is a 990 Pro m.2 nvme.
I did a test in BR right after I got workstation set up. It was a rather heavy scene with about 10GB (mostly scattered landscaping stuff) loaded onto GPUs. My test was rendering a certain amount of frames that I can’t recall… maybe 10 frames, maybe 20. Here were the results:
Both GPUs took 2:32.
Main GPU alone took 3:09.
eGPU took 3:03.
I was quite unhappy to see both GPUs together not even shaving off a paltry 30 seconds in this test. Keep in mind C, I have been rendering with multiple GPUs going back to when I started with two GTX 460s in 2010 using Octane. And had three GPUs in multiple configs since then… I had three 980Ti when I first bought B-R over six years ago. So I have been pretty used to having much better performance with each additional GPU, especially when I was using Octane (which nearly perfectly doubled performance with two GPUs and tripled it with three). It is what it is and Blender does not utilize multi-GPUs nearly as well as Octane, but regardless, I have to try and squeeze more out of my setup because I am going to have shitloads of frames to render over the coming months.
I have yet to do a test of working in Blender on main GPU and rendering in BR on eGPU, but hopefully that will work great to be doing some rendering throughout the day. But I am much more concerned with said beast rendering like a mofo overnight (the majority of blends will be medium to heavy, usually between 120 - 400 frames each shot)…
So knowing what you know about my setup and situation, what is your recommendation for me rendering when I am not using the workstation and 100% of system resources can be utilized?
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I suppose this is valid just for user that have already bought the Win version. Right?
Hi!
Thanks a lot as always for your support!
Wow, incredible worksatations, congrats!
Have you tried B-renderon parallel GPU modes?
When you first use these modes, you need to select the GPU’s you want to use to render (of course you can edit this selection later if needed) and B-renderon automaticlaly duplicates each job as many times as GPU’s you selected and sets overwrites off and placeholders on so each GPU will render a different frame at a time. This can be a great way to take advantage of multiple gpus on a pc (depending on the scene and your cpu since that will probably become the bottleneck)
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Yes! Purchasing B-renderon gives you access to both Win and Linux versions (and eventually Mac as well if I manage to create Mac builds).
No, I had not tried that! I will do a test first chance I get, in the next couple days… So if I had, say four blends, it would make eight render items in the queue, two for each? And presumably if one GPU was still rendering a last frame and the other was done, the one would wait for the other to finish before both GPUs would start on the next blend… do I have this right?
Yes except It wouldn’t wait, whenever there’s an available GPU and a job to be rendered it starts it.
But couldn’t that possibly overload sys ram (keep in mind I only have a measly 32GB for now, until ram prices come back down to planet Earth)?.. That was the first thing I thought of when you said it loads into two render items each blend. Or is geo and textures completely on GPUs and not touching ram while rendering? I just want to make sure shit isn’t going to hang or crash in the middle of the night, wasting valuable time…
Waiting for a blend to finish wouldn’t help in that case since then it’s going to be rendering with two parallel instances anyway. When rendering parallel instances each one is an independent blender instance running in the background so yeah, depending on the scenes you are rendering ram could become a bottleneck.
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Okay, that makes sense. I will keep this in mind as I set up animations. The vast majority of my stuff loaded onto GPUs is linked landscaping crap… Hopefully that helps the sys ram situation… Or does that not make any difference?
Spring sale is on!
B-renderon is 25% off at https://superhivemarket.com/products/b-renderon
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Hi, we’ve been using B-Renderon at work for quite some time now and it is truly a huge time saver, thank you very much!
Now, I have a question, is there an online documentation, video tutorial or any other kind of resource were we can go deeper into the program?
For the most part everything is fairly easy to understand and use intuitively but there are some things that aren’t so straightforward, for example, the whole Extra Arguments section (and especially the use of custom python scripts) is something we haven’t used before and I would like to understand it better, but I can’t find anything online about it…
Thanks in advance!
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Hi!
Hi, we’ve been using B-Renderon at work for quite some time now and it is truly a huge time saver, thank you very much!
Really glad to read that!
Regarding documentation, there’s the user manual available among download files at superhive which gives a general overview and explanations of features, and you can always ask me any questions here or at superhive via p.m. I have several videos planned going deeper into some of the more specialized features but I haven’t had the time to make them yet.
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Thanks, I completely missed the pdf on the downloads for the addon (somehow I was only seeing the documentation for v3) 
I’ll check it out and come back if I have any specific questions.
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is the documentation page down on superhive?
Ah yes, honestly I had forgotten about the documentation page there. The official documentation is currently the pdf in the download files and I’m working on some video tutorials.
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Quick demonstration of batch collection rendering:
https://youtube.com/shorts/oolNSqAVUFU?si=CEOJVkDv_3YfWEbU
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Hey pal! This collection rendering stuff is definitely interesting, but I am trying to envision what type of scenarios I would use this. Typically if I wanted to render different versions of things I would just save out a blend for each and toss them into B-R. Is this method better and shaves off a significant amount of time for things like that? Please edify us good sir! I like to have all options on the table and I always have one eye on the efficiency of my workflow…
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Hey!
For me it’s just a workflow convenience thing. In my job sometimes I’ve had to render lot’s of variations of things (same lighting and scene for different products, different lighting sets for a product, etc), and keeping everything in a scene organized with collections and rendering all variations with a few clicks has been a real time server on those occasions.
Unfortunately I couldn’t show a real case from my job in the video and just used a few ugly variations of Suzanne lol.
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