Crashing Blender using bpy.ops.render.render from a different thread

Technical Support Python Support
1

I’m started to control blender (2.61) using a little webserver script and sending commands to it from a browser. It’s running fine for changing object locations.
But as soon as i call bpy.ops.render.render from the script, blender crashes.
Any idea how to solve this?
Thanks,
Stephan


import threading
import http.server
import socketserver
from urllib.parse import urlparse
import time
import bpy

PORT = 8000
IP_ADDRESS = "localhost"
#IP_ADDRESS = "192.168.254.1"
global running
running = 1


class RequestHandler(http.server.BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
    def _writeheaders(self):
      self.send_response(200)
      self.send_header('Content-type', 'text/html; charset=UTF-8')
      self.end_headers()
    
    def do_HEAD(self):
      self._writeheaders()
        
    def do_GET(self):
      global running  
      parsed_path = urlparse(self.path)
      #ctx = bpy.context.active_object
      #print(ctx)
      
      #bpy.ops.screen.screenshot(filepath="c:\	emp\	est8.bmp")
      try:
        params = dict([p.split('=') for p in parsed_path[4].split('&')])
      except:
        params = {}
      print(params)    
      try:
        running = int(params["running"])
      except:
        running = 1
      try:
        print("Here i am")
        #Here it crashes!
        bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)
      except:
        print("no xrot")      
      self._writeheaders()
      retstr = """<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Dummy response</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>dummy response</BODY>
</HTML>"""
      self.wfile.write(retstr.encode('latin'))
      print("running = ",running) 

    
httpd = socketserver.TCPServer((IP_ADDRESS, PORT), RequestHandler)



class HttpThread(threading.Thread):
  def __init__(self):
    threading.Thread.__init__(self)
  def run(self):
    print("HTTP Server THREAD: started")
    print("serving at port", PORT)
    httpd.serve_forever()
    print ("HTTP Server THREAD: finished")
      
class ControlThread(threading.Thread):
  def __init__(self):
    threading.Thread.__init__(self)
  def run(self):
    print("Control THREAD: started")
    runcontrol = 1    
    while runcontrol >0:
      if running < 1:
        print("try server shutdown")
        httpd.shutdown()
        httpd.socket.close() 
        print("shutdown finished")
        runcontrol = 0
      time.sleep(1)                
        
    print ("Control THREAD: finished")
            
print ("SCRIPT: started")    
http_thread = HttpThread()
http_thread.start()

control_thread = ControlThread()
control_thread.start()
print ("SCRIPT: finished")
2

You might want to read up on the API gotchas.
http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_62_2/search.html?q=gotchas&check_keywords=yes&area=default

Blender does not play well with threading.
The context is always None when rendering.