Rendering without Blender running. Faster or slower?

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi, I’ve heard much talk of rendering from the command line (or similar) instead of rendering from within blender.

Does anybody have any experience with this method?

Is it a faster method than using the renderer with Blender running?

Thanks in advance for any advice you might be able to give,

Sonix.

2

Hi,

I usually render from command line all my animations.

It is faster, but I cannot quantize it, because Blender does not interact with display at all (windows, rendering window, cursor with numbers, monitoring ESC key, etc.)

It is more economical, because GUI is not opened and less memory allocated.

It can be helpfull also for very big stills.

Stefano

3

How do you render from the command line, I like the sound of that?

4
  • Config your Blend file as if for normal rendering (frame range, render dir).
  • Save your blend and quit
  • Open a command line prompt
  • Go to Blender dir
  • Type blender - h for all available options

blender -b filename.blend Renders the file
blender -b filename.blend -s 1 -e 100 -a Renders frames 1 to 100
blender -b filename.blend -f 1 Renders only frame 1

5

Great, thanks. I look forward to trying it out

6

I have an idea, is it possible to adapt Blender into a stripped down version of it’self that just contains the rendering system. This would give a small amount of control over the command line method. Maybe this is possible using the Web-plugin I don’t know. It’d be cool to have an interface of some kind. Perhaps this has already been suggested.

Is this possible with Windows? I’m running '98 for my sins. I recognise the ‘-h’ switch being a Linux/Unix command.

Also I notice that .bfont should be in a directory called .blender

Windows will not let me create a directory begining with a “.” is there a workround for Windows?

Thanks for the replies,

Sonix.

7

The command line arguments are taken care of by Blender itself, so it’s quite OS insensitive.

Windows will not let me create a directory begining with a “.” is there a workround for Windows?

Create the folder as blender and rename it as .blender in a console.

Martin

8

Thanks Martin. “In a console” I presume this is the equivalent of a Dos window?

Sonix.

9

Yup, a DOS console, command line, whatever you call it.

Martin

10

Thanks again Martin, much appreciated.

Sonix.