regcs
commented
3 years ago Renderfarm Implementation (Experimental)
The rendering of still holograms and holographic animations can be a time-consuming task on. Therefore, this add-on provides a command line mechanism that was created for render farms which want to support the quilt rendering by Alice/LG on their systems. Since it has not been tested on a render farm environment yet, this feature is considered experimental. If you are working at a render farm and need help to implement this mechanism on your system, please open an issue on the add-on's GitHub repository.
Basic Command Line Calls
As a first prerequisite, Alice/LG needs to be installed and activated on the render farm's Blender installation. To initiate a quilt rendering from the command line, there are two main calls which are understood by Alice/LG:
-alicelg-render: Start the rendering of a single quilt.-alicelg-render-anim: Start the rendering of a quilt animation.
Both arguments require that Blender is started in background mode (i.e., using the '-b' command line argument) and with a .blend-file specified, which contains all the necessary render settings. Furthermore, both arguments must be preceded by a --. An example, which opens the file 'my_lg_hologram.blend' and starts rendering a single quilt looks like that:
blender -b my_lg_hologram.blend -- -alicelg-render
Additional Parameters
The add-on also understands the some additional parameters to fine-tune the rendering process. These parameters are very similar to Blender's internal command line rendering parameters:
-oor--render-output<path>: Set the render path and file name. Automatically disables the "Add Metadata" option.-sor--frame-start<frame>: Set start to frame<frame>, supports +/- for relative frames too.-eor--frame-end<frame>: Set end to frame<frame>, supports +/- for relative frames too.-jor--frame-jump<frame>: Set number of frames to step forward after each rendered frame-for--render-frame: Specify a single frame to render
It is important that these arguments are specified after the mandatory -- to notify Blender that the arguments are meant for the add-on. An example call which would start Blender in background mode, load the 'my_lg_hologram.blend' file, and render a quilt animation from frame 10 to 24 with the base file name quilt_anim would look like this:
blender -b my_lg_hologram.blend -- -alicelg-render-anim -o /tmp/quilt_anim.png -s 10 -e 24
Another example, which would only render the frame 16 as a single quilt, would like this:
blender -b my_lg_hologram.blend -- -alicelg-render -o /tmp/quilt.png -f 16
We need to document the new functionality in the readme and on the Looking Glass website, so render farms now how to implement it.