Hi,
I’ve been hearing about these “game streaming” services for some time, like vortex.gg, GeForce Now, amongst others - I was just wondering: is there some way Blender could be offered this way? ie. it runs on a remote server, which does all the heavy lifting, and it just streams the user interface to me, on the client side. I say this because I would like to work in a realtime viewport in EEVEE, ie. NOT HAVE TO RENDER ANYTHING EVER AGAIN!! (my computer’s pretty humble).
Do you know anybody who has plans to set something like this up? Or even, has already Done it??
If you have an ultra-fast connection and the server isn’t halfway around the world, then it could be workable.
However, the BF would either have to build an incredibly expensive server-farm to handle the streaming demands or pay for a service like Amazon AWS. What that means is that you might inevitably need to pay by the month to use Blender in order for them to pay the bill.
Just to note, last I read I think the BF can actually work around the GPL by requiring streamers to pay for a closed-sourced client application, whose job then is to interface with the cloud farm and retrieve the data. It would either be that or the BF gets another big boost in monthly donations to make it available for everyone.
" you might inevitably need to pay by the month to use Blender in order for them to pay the bill." - Yeah, I wasn’t discounting this! All that hardware and data has to be paid for,…?
" I could be mistaken, but isn’t the nimble collective as service like this?"
I checked out that site, couldn’t figure out what it was exactly, heh! Could you tell me? What is a “virtual animation studio”?
It is exactly what you were looking for. When I said that, I was just going off of my memory of an old blender conference video, so I wasn’t 100% sure. I looked the video up again, and it seems that this is exactly the type of service you are talking about:
In your home, using your LOCAL network (wired or wireless), you could use a super anemic netbook/ultrabook/even a tablet and stream the screen from your beefy computer that’s very very far away, as long as the “screen” device is good enough to decode a fullHD video with little effort.
Some examples of good local streaming solutions:
Splashtop
Team Viewer
Windows remote something (forgot how it’s called)
ultraVNC
FreeRDP
google Remote Desktop
so on and so forth
Some of them allow remote access (so you could controll your beefy pc away from home), but it’s network intensive and will lag a lot.
I have just started using Paperspace for this, and it works surprisingly well! If your network connection is fast and stable enough, it is just like working on a local pc. They have instances with NVIDIA Quadro P4000, P5000 and P6000 GPU’s and they are adding Quadro RTX GPU’s soon. Until recently my MacBook Pro with integrated graphics was struggling to handle basic modeling with its fans running at full speed all the time, and now I am playing with smoke and fluid sims without any problem. The GPU machines are priced $0.51-1.10 per hour, the P5000 seems to be the best deal at $0.78/hour unless you need the absolute fastest rendering speed. I now tend to start projects on my pc, and once I notice it starts struggling I will move it over to Paperspace and continue there. One tip if you start using it: I had the mouse cursor disappearing all the time, this is fixed by enabling the always show local cursor option.
Paperspace is basically a complete pc in the cloud. When you boot it up you get a regular windows (or Linux) home screen. You can then install and use any app you want, just like you would do on your own pc. You can signup from anywhere, but performance is best if you are relatively close to one of their datacenters, which they currently have in the US and the Netherlands. The connection lag tends to be very low, as one of the intended purposes is gaming, and therefore viewport performance is also very responsive.
This video gives a pretty good impression of how it works: Youtube
The nible collective option is appealing, but a can’t seem to find their website. Someone linked it above, but the link doesn’t work.
About the remote desktop apps: from what I’ve learned recently, not only the network connections speed is a limitation, but also the opengl hardware acceleration. Programs like the windows integrated RDC doesn’t support opengl acceleration at all apparently. Other programs (teamviewer, all the VNC apps) do support openGL acceleration, but it looks like nvidia support this only on the quadro drivers. This means that with a geforce card, openGL won’t work (it works only as software emulation) on a remote desktop.
This really limits the performance you can achieve with any 3d app remotely.
Does anyone know more about this? Any workarounds, or alternative ways to have a proper openGL support on a remote desktop without having to buy a quadro card?
Hi, I’ve had this exact problem, OpenGL not working on a normal remote desktop. The solution was HP RGS (see here), this uses all the features of your GPU, including Geforce. You install the Sender on your good desktop, and the Receiver on your remote device, (laptop, tablet, etc). The Sender is free for HP workstations, for other computers you need to buy a license, the Receiver is free.
(my computer’s pretty humble).