Rendering to a local Linux PC via SSH

Tutorials, Tips and Tricks
1

I’m posting this because I couldn’t find any content here regarding using the terminal to render onto a separate machine on LAN. Hopefully this can be helpful to someone else. There are per-requisites, like having an SSH server setup on the host, but I’m assuming that’s all setup.

Sometimes I want to render to my gaming PC with a GPU in it, rather than render to my laptop where I’m working. I can do this by SSHing into that machine and running this command:

./Documents/blender-5.0.1-linux-x64/blender -b ~/Nextcloud2/floralpaintest/floralpainttest.blend -o //render -F JPEG -f 0

This tells blender that I want it to run in the -b background without a UI, which Blender file I want to render, where I want the -o output to be, which is in the same folder and the rendered file will be called render, and then to -F force the output to be JPEG and finally to render only -f frame 0 zero.

I’m sure I could do this in one detached ssh command, rather than staying in the ssh connection, but I like to see the progress of the render in the terminal output.

The folder where the file is rendered is synced to my laptop machine via Nextcloud, so I can view it on my local laptop, rather than copying it from the gaming PC.

Hope this helps someone searching like I was!

Resources:

  1. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/command_line/render.html - General usage for Blender terminal arguments
  2. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/advanced/command_line/arguments.html - All arugments
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2

I do that using Flamenco, from Blender Studio:

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That’s interesting indeed! Curious project. I wonder if it renders all the frames on a single machine or distributes several frames across several machines. I have lots of old laptops lying around and I wonder if they could be used with their old CPUs to render out different frames in an animation, for instance.

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It queues the jobs with the manager, which hands out frames as the workers request them. So it can scale up to a lot of machines, even if some of them are slow. IDK how efficient old laptops would be at CPU rendering, but yeah, you could do it. Each would just work at its own pace and when it finishes a frame would request the next in the queue from the manager.

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