Sethlans 1.0.0 Beta 1 - Cross Platform Render Farm!

(Mario Estrella) #1

Hello All,

I’ve been working on a render farm application, Sethlans, that runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. Sethlans is designed to be a render farm that can work in both local and remote networks utilizing Blender as the rendering backend. It is written in Java 8 and is open source software.

NOTE: Only Blender 2.79b is supported at this time.

This is still a work in progress but the program is mature enough to enter a public beta phase.

My goal in designing this application was to make it user friendly but also taking into consideration security.

The setup is facilitated through wizards, I also plan on uploading some video tutorials on YouTube within the next couple of days.

If you’ve worked with Blender and have used any of the distributed render farm services on the net then a lot of things should look familiar.

You can download it from the github project page here:

https://github.com/dryad-naiad-software/sethlans/releases

Documentation will be available here(work in progress, Get Started is Done):
https://sethlans-docs.dryadandnaiad.com/

Here’s a short list of features that are present in this version:

  • Cross Platform
  • Web based project administration
  • Real time project updates
  • Discovery of Sethlans nodes on network
  • AVI and MP4 animation encoding
  • Multi-GPU support on nodes
  • AMD GPU Support
  • Combined CPU and GPU rendering on a single node
  • Blender version selection per project
  • User access control. Regular users can see their own projects but not others. Administrators can see all.
(Lalaland) #2

Can this distribute rendering of a still image ?

(Mario Estrella) #3

Yes it can, it allows you to break an image into parts.

(Mario Estrella) #4

Uploading tutorials and demos of Sethlans here, stay tuned:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAJJNyB064n8RyWhO992eDg

(tonton) #5

Hi @ForneusZagan , thanks for this tool, i just made a quick test, looks very promising !
Does this tool will be able to render remote projects (through internet, p2p…) or only on local network ?

I’m lacking some tray informations, currently your tray widget only propose to open the main panel in browser, it would be great to have some info about the local node, like with cgru afanasy (color code to show you if it is rendering…)

Do you plan to have a blender addon to send a project directly from blender ? i know i’m lazy, but it’s kind of convenient :wink:

Is there a way to get locally the rendered frames without “downloading” them through the browser, if for example the blend is in a server/share drive and the render path is set to relative on this same drive ?

Is there a detailed task log for the render node and server ? and a list of the computed frames ?

Do you have a roadmap somewhere ?

When first using the tool, it downloads blender (nice btw !) but if it is already installed on this computer, is there a way to override this and use the current blender version (which is also a 2.79b) ?

Anyway tools is already working so great !
easy to use and setup, with a lot of automation (like downloading blender…)
A big thank for your work, i’ll check regularly for updates :wink:
cheers !

(Mario Estrella) #6

Hi Tonton,

  • It does everything via HTTPS so internet is fine. During the setup you have an option to set an IP address. This would be the communication address used between server and node. By default it goes with the machine’s private IP address but you could set this up to a public IP and open up the port on a firewall and it would work just fine.

  • Regarding the tray information I can look into it. I created the system tray as a way of gracefully closing out the program should it ever crash on Windows or Mac. So I don’t forget though could you put in a feature request on github.

  • I do plan on creating an addon for blender the framework is already there.

  • All the projects are located in .sethlans/projects and you can download the finished images/movies from there as well.

  • No task log yet, the information exists in the database, just need to collect it and make a front end page. There is a Render History page under Admin > Render History but probably not as detailed. It’s meant for troubleshooting jobs.

  • Unfortunately no, but will work on putting on up on github.

  • That would require a rewrite of quite a few sections of the program since the server designed to handle the downloaded blender and distribute it amongst the nodes. Also this allows us to spin up multiple blender instances and not interfere with the settings present on the users machine.

(tonton) #7

hey thanks for your quick answer !

Nice for working through internet, i’ll test it when i get a chance !
i’ll post a feature request on github for the tray !
And yep, i get it for the other questions ! :wink: I’ll try a test with mac config when i get a chance !

(Mario Estrella) #8

For those interested. I’ve added a couple more tutorials to the Sethlans Install and Setup playlist. A few more videos to go before this list is complete then I’ll create some project creation and some more demos.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAJJNyB064n8RyWhO992eDg