Simple cloud rendering

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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Hello Guys,

Recently I’ve found that there is no simple way to render using cloud (like GCP/Amazon) - everyone actually buying some hardware and building ~$3000-5000 render farms or using some proprietary net-rendering solutions, which are unstable or have none security to be somehow used in a cloud environment.

So I decided to build the “BlendNet” addon for blender 2.8 with GCP provider support - “preemptible” instances could be really useful for the rendering purposes and could offer ~$0.5 per quite complicated cycles frame. GCP is offering $300 for anyone to play with and it’s easy to setup the project and actually run your render without any man-in-the-middle. If the addon will become useful - there is a number of things to add, like cost estimation, another providers to support, etc. So hopefully it will help you guys.

Here you can find the addon sources and some documentation: https://github.com/state-of-the-art/BlendNet/

Known issues:

  • Tested only on Linux - hopefully should work on MacOSX and maybe will work on Windows (but expect errors).
  • Initial configuration is quite hard for someone who never used GCP gcloud utility
  • Tested only on GCP with default project - so if you have some interesting configs, it could fail
  • Agents will have external ip to download external resources (updates, blender binary)
  • Some settings are not working - for example you can’t specify the existing manager IP, so only dynamic creation on GCP
  • Auto-shutdown of the Manager - so you have to stop it manually
  • Save of the Manager/Agent tasks information between runs - do not shutdown Manager until you get all the required information from it
  • Simple auto download the results - right now they are downloaded only if you previewing them
  • Not tested render with dependencies (images,caches) - so could contain some minor issues
  • Interface is responsive - but relies on user interaction, so if it’s not updating - just fly mouse around it
  • Providers interface is not looks good - will be rewritten
  • Animation (multiple frames) tasks creation glitches (sometimes stuck for some reason on some frames) and slow, but could be used somehow)
  • No Manager tasks control Addon interface

Please read the documentation and HOWTO’s on github repo Wiki to try to use the addon properly.

Thank you.

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As usual 25% of the plan are taking ~50% of time… But finally I prepared alpha version of the addon - I updated the header with the required information.

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Hello Guys,

First demo test results: Cosmos Laundromat Demo from official blender demo page

  • Modifications: I just unpacked the resources from the blend file to test how they will be found and uploaded.
  • Reference render (tiles):
    • Configuration: 48 threads, progressive (2x Xeon E5-2680, 128GB, xUbuntu 18.04)
    • Render time: 10:50.10
  • Reference render (progressive):
    • Configuration: 48 threads, progressive (2x Xeon E5-2680, 128GB, xUbuntu 18.04)
    • Render time: 13:04.41
  • BlendNet render:
    • Configuration: Manager n1-standard-1, Agents 3x n1-standard-16 (highcpu have not enough ram)
    • Render time: 13:06.30 (without running manager/agents)

So I think it’s quite optimal right now - the same results with the reference progressive render is a huge value of the system. Of course we need to work on support for tile rendering, because 2min difference is pretty big if we will multiply it by thousands of frames. And remaining calculation still requires some improvement…

Some BlendNet render screenshots:

Results to compare:

Manager task response (some verbosity):

{"success": true, "message": "Got task status info", "data": {"state": "COMPLETED", "create_time": 1571786754, "start_time": 1571786884, "end_time": 1571787856, "project": "benchmark.blend", "samples": 600, "seed": 1400925772, "frame": 2472, "samples_done": 600, "remaining": 441, "result": {"preview": "a1daab67a6791b3b61f1b459b810bac055e63a5b", "render": "145808ba01785718ab73a894aeda492c1dca8eaa"}, "start_time_actual": 1571786975, "samples_per_workload": 100, "samples_acquired": 600, "workloads_taken": 6, "results_processing": false}}
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Just in case anyone checking this page - the new release v0.2 is available, you can check the demo video right here:

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this looks quite interesting! I need to test this out when I have some time, thanks for sharing!

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I haven’t checked it out - is it only for US users? Can you pay for this “cloud” stuff from other countries? Does it take Bitcoin or something??

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Hi, that’s the thing - it’s not some addon for proprietary cloud. It just allow you to use the general clouds (Google Cloud for now, and soon Amazon, Azure, Digital Ocean and local farm) without paying the man in the middle (because almost every proprietary render clouds just uses the big cloud providers).

So if you have access to GCP in your country - it will work.

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Just in case anyone checking this page - the new release v0.3 is available, you can check the demo video right here:

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This looks very interesting.

Is it possible to use blendnet to split the render between the available resources on a local machine i.e. send Scene A to the CPU, Scene B to GPU1 and Scene C to GPU2?

Thanks

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Hi @anon71893420, in general about splitting the CPU - I used docker for testing the local provider and mem/cpu limits there is working well.

About GPU - BlendNet is not supporting it officially right now. You can try to select the required render device in settings and use those settings for different Manager/Agents environments… I think it could work, but you defenetely will need to check the script-render.py file, which is actually perform rendering on Agent.

Overall the GPU support is necessary of course, but for now it’s hard to test properly. So if you can try and provide some information - that will be great) Added a new ticket to work on the feature: https://github.com/state-of-the-art/BlendNet/issues/83

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Hi, this addon is a great idea, but sadly it is not working for me, I don’t know why.

I’m trying to do it using aws, but once the manager connects and is running, the ‘Run image task’ and ‘run animation tasks’ buttons are disabled and I cannot do anything, even I cannot choose an agent.

Any ideas on how to solve this? I have tried with Blender 2.93.5 and 2.93.4. Am I missing something?

image

It says it’s connecting, but seems that the manager is already running, and if I check in the aws console there is there blendnet instance running, and I also have a bucket in S3.

Then if I restart Blender it doesn’t say “Manager connecting”, just “idle”, but still the same problem. I can only get the manager running…