Hello everyone, I have some exciting news to share! A front end gui job manager for Brenda render farm software is in development!
Take advantage of the powerful and affordable rendering capability of the Brenda software without worrying about the command line interface.
More info here: http://brendapro.com/appdev/
Awesome. Looks great. I´m esspecially interested in this:
“Handle multiple concurrent render jobs as well as the separate render node orders for each job”
Thanks! Make sure to sign up on the mailing list (through the above posted link) as that will be the primary news channel for development.
I tried signing up a couple of times but whenever I hit the “submit” button nothing happens.
Excellent, Todd! Thank you.
Is there a plan to implement simulation baking (particles, smoke, fluids and stuff like that) into the GUI?
Very promising! I never used brenda because I was afraid of the whole setup/commandline stuff. I like to just hit a button 
Really appreciate your effort to make it more artist friendly! 
@lumpengnom Right now the plan is just to streamline the render job process for more standard jobs. Adding support for baking is probably possible but would be far down the feature list right now. I’ll probably have a feature request list at some point once the first version of BrendaPro comes out.
Lumengnom - were you able to finally add yourself to the mailing list or did the form not work for you? The fields are required, maybe you didn’t enter all of them? Let me know… todd[at]resonancemedia.ca
Yes, it worked now using Internet Explorer. Before that I used Firefox and it didn´t work even after dactivating plugins such as Adblock and Ghostery which sometimes cause similar problems on other web sites.
Adding support for baking is probably possible but would be far down the feature list right now.
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This is great news Todd! If any one sees this and doesn’t understand why this is a BIG deal…
Amazon provides inexpensive and flexible computing power.
Cycles doesn’t need a paid license for each of its render nodes (for example V-Ray costs $2500 (US) for just 10!
Thousands of Amazon computers at a time can be used to render your Blender animation frames. Each costing not much more than the electricity needed to run them.
Todd’s “BrendaPro” software will help remove the main barrier to entry for most Blender users, which was that the original “Brenda” is a command line tool.
In conclusion, if you’re a freelancer or small animation studio using Blender you can charge your client substantially less for test and final renders than your non-Blender using competition
I would love to see a windows version of the brenda gui app as soon as possible.
To put this into perspecitve. I frequently render at prices that are around 1/8th ot 1/10th of a commercial render farm. In fact rendering on Amazon is in the same price range as the electricity costs for rendering at home.
Only thing is that works only on Linux and OSX.
Actually, I just did some testing on Windows last night, and you can actually install and run brenda on Windows. What you can’t do (currently) is run any of the brenda-tool ssh commands because there is no native ssh tool on Windows. I was able to actually fill a task queue, order instances and see the rendered frames show up in my output S3 bucket, all from a Windows vm.
However, if anything goes awry during the render job, there’s no easy way to ssh into the nodes and inspect the logs. Brenda source code would have to be modified to allow brenda to use some other ssh tool for a Windows install. So, it’s still possible, just more work to get it running.
The initial release of the BrendaPro gui will be targeting OSX and Linux first. If I figure out a way to get a Windows version working, I’ll definitely try to do it. The key with the gui is to make the artist’s life easier and streamline the brenda job management process. That’s currently still a challenge on Windows.
Also, Renderbot doesn’t implement brenda usage on Windows natively. It’s just because it’s all running on an EC2 instance, and you can access it via ssh after you install a specific SSH tool in Windows. It’s a good idea, but still not very streamlined for the average non-technial artist.
Do I understand you correctly that with your app the user will be able to set up the AMI by himself? Meaning that if I want to use some more exotic version of Blender, say the Fracture Modifier branch for example I will be able to do that?
@lumpengnom - no that’s not the intention. The point of the app is to reduce the complexity of using brenda, so I will be creating BrendaPro AMI’s with the latest official builds on a regular basis and the app will pull those in to the drop menu for easy selection. Alternatively if you’ve created your own ami you can enter the ami-id in the open text box to use that.
Also, if anyone is interested, I’ve been able to install and run brenda on my Windows 8 machine recently, including the ssh commands, which I don’t believe anyone else has done yet.
If you’re up for it and well-cafeinated, the tech details are here: http://brendapro.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=76&p=235#p235
You’re a machine! I’ll give this a try when I get some free time and we’ll see if the directions are idiot proof
