Command line arguments for rendering

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

Hi,

I’m setting up a renderfarm. I don’t know anything about DrQueue, but I plan to submit jobs using SGE (Sun Grid Engine) which I think basically does the same thing. At least, it will take care of all the cluster queueing and job management I need.

What I’d like is to be able to get as much information as I can into blender command line options. I need a more complete reference (assuming that this is out of date) than this:

http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Reference/CL

But this is the only reference I can find to Blender command line arguments, and it’s from 2.32. Have there been any command line options added lately? For example, I want to be able to send outputted renders to specific directories in the command line, overriding what’s set in the blend, etc.

I haven’t looked into any wrapper scripts for this, because as I said I’ve got the job management side of things more or less worked out already.

T

2

To get the list of command line options revelant to the version of blender you intend to run, do the following in a command window.

$ cd …path to blender binary folder …
$ blender --help

Very few command-line options have changed in the past while I think, so that doc may still apply.

Aligorith

3

Thanks. Actually, maybe what I need is a script. I have used respower a lot, and I know that I can input, for example, output file type into a field on their website, and this will override what I have in the file itself. So somehow they are overriding that presumably from the command line (I know they aren’t going in and editing my .blends). Anybody know of a script that does this?

4

Indeed, -h gave me a more complete list of options. Thanks for that. However, now I’m using them and I can’t get them to work. I want (expect) the command line options to override what’s in the .blend (otherwise what’s the point?) but my renders are coming out with the path and format as specified in the blend, not as specified in the command line. Any idea what I’m doing wrong? For example, I have -F PNG, which means format should be png, but the blend specifies targa, so they are coming out targa. Same problem with the output path.

5

If nobody can see where I might be doing something wrong, then maybe I could talk somebody into testing this out and verifying that it’s a bug? I have tested it in both Linux and in Mac, and it seems to me that command line options for setting file format and output location have no effect whatsoever, which would seem to me to be a bug.