Hey guys and gals,
I’m working on a small animation project (for work; nothing exciting) that includes multiple files. I’d like to be able to render the files automatically: once file 1 is rendered, render file 2, etc. Is there any way to do that? This may be a very simple question or a very complex one… I lost track of the features so long ago I don’t even anymore.
Thanks all.
Loki Render. If you run it in Master/Grunt mode, your machine is the both and you don’t need any other slaves in the network.
Runs in all OS as it’s javabased.
Select the Blender executable, add a job, select .blend, animation framerange and where to save the pngs.
Once your list is set, click go. 
with the network renderer:
1.start blender choose network-render
2.switch to master and start service
3.start another blender with your brojects and choose network-render
4.switch to client and press refresh, it will update new buttons down
5.press on (animation on network) to add your project to the list
6.close your projects blender and start another blender
7.choose network-render and switch to client and start service
now it will automatically start rendering your scenes.
to check progress you press on open master monitor
ok, huh, i’m finished!
Write a batch file to run blender from the console. Just simple DOS commands in a text file that would execute blender. On a windows machine, you’d type the commands in a text editor (notepad) and save with the extension of .bat and once you create the text file, just double click it to execute, (or run from a dos prompt).
Here’s a listing of the command line switches: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Command_Line
And if you save the .bat file inside blender’s folder, there should be no need for drive paths for executing blender, just the file path for the .blend file. If you have the start/end frames, output format and output directory set in the .blend files, then the commands in the .bat file should be as simple as:
blender -b file1.blend
blender -b file2.blend
etc....
There’s really no need to mess with loki render (which I have read good things about) or blender’s netrender (which I’ve heard so-so things about) if you can use the command line…
Randy
It’s going to be running on Mac OSX… can I write the script as BASH?
Loki render looks good too, but if I can do it with BASH, so much the better.
Not familiar with Mac OSX (wish I had one to play with!) but looking at these two links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_%28Unix_shell%29
http://www.alvinpoh.com/how-to-make-and-run-batch-files-in-terminal-in-mac-osx/
I’d say that’s exactly what you want to do. As a trial, I think I would change the default scene to a 2 frame animation saving the output as .png and save the .blend with a name like pngtest.blend, then change the output to .jpg and save the .blend with a new name like jpgtest.blend.
Then write your script so it’s something like this:
blender -b pngtest.blend
blender -b jpgtest.blend
and save it in your blender folder, then execute it. You probably will need to ad ‘./’ before ‘blender’ in the above example, but I’m unsure about that… I really don’t have that much experience with unix-like systems.
Randy
edit: looking at the 2nd link, you might have to change the permissions for the script so it will execute.
Well, I set up a script and as we speak it is supposedly rendering on the studio computer. Tomorrow morning I’ll go up and see how they came out. For now, fingers crossed! (It did appear to be working peachy when I left.)