Can I run Blender on a virtual Desktop in the Cloud?
Does anybody have experience with it?
I would like to run lengthy scientific calculations (calculation of complicated geometries) in the cloud.
Yes. Fire up a virtual machine in Amazon, Azure etc, install Blender and remote desktop solution of your choice and voila.
In case anyone is thinking of cloud rendering.
I tried setting up a ‘command line’ in the cloud for rendering and it was relatively easy. I used google compute engine, chose 4 core std debian but presume it would be faster, so run less time, with more cores and probably more power or memory, various options. I followed the helpful suggestions to make ssh keys etc then opened a terminal from my laptop. I then did the following (by a process of trial and error, seeing what seemed to missing at each stage).
wget http://mirror.cs.umn.edu/blender.org/release/Blender2.78/blender-2.78a-linux-glibc211-x86_64.tar.bz2
sudo apt-get install lbzip2 # couldn’t extract at first - install this
sudo apt-get install bzip2 # still wouldn’t extract - add this
tar -xjf blender-2.78a-linux-glibc211-x86_64.tar.bz2 # at last
rm blender-2.78a-linux-glibc211-x86_64.tar.bz2 # for tidyness
mv blender-2.78a-linux-glibc211-x86_64 blender278a # to save typing later
mkdir blends # add a bit of structure
cd blends
mkdir renders
sudo apt-get install libglu1 # complaints when trying to run blender
sudo apt-get install libxi6 libgconf-2-4 # more complaints
sudo apt-get install libxrender1 # this seemed to be the last of missing libraries
cd ~ # back to home dir
use filezilla (or fireftp, but slow) to put a blend file in the blends dir, must be ready to render
blender278a/blender -b blends/mycartoon.blend -o blends/renders/mycartoon### -f 1…100
move the rendered images back using filezilla, there’s not an enormous amount of space by default
It seems to render twice as fast as my i5 laptop and costs $0.05 per core per hour while it’s running - NB remember to switch your compute engine instance off when you’ve finished with it. Google give you $300, 60 days free as a trial starter
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Thank you for the excellent instructions.
I wish the people at Google were half as good as you when it comes to documentation.
BTW, the Google free trial is now $300 or 1 year which ever comes first.