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ubisoft / shotmanager

Shot Manager is a Blender add-on that introduces a true shot entity in Blender scenes, as well as a wide and powerful set of tools to build and edit sequences in real-time directly in the 3D context.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Converting to Markers for Render Farm (or other way to do so) #47

Closed pesjakves closed 2 years ago

pesjakves commented 2 years ago

Hello, me again. I am looking for a way to use Shot Manager with Render Farms. So far, I did not come up with a way to do it as I cannot get the addon to render farms' machines. One way I came up with would be

The first method seems a bit easier and I hope it would not mess things up that much :) Is there a way to convert Shot Manager shots to Markers with Camera Binding?

Thank you for your work !

Best regards

Mikoláš

pesjakves commented 2 years ago

I hope I might use Barista as it works more like a remote desktop on Amazon servers from what I understood, but I am still not sure :) https://blendermarket.com/products/barista

werwack commented 2 years ago

Hi @pesjakves,

Interesting pipeline questions :)

I don't know exactly what is the current state of network rendering with Blender. Shot Manager was designed to provide quick rendering for users (real-time in the viewports as much as possible, playblast, local rendering). There was no need for network rendering and at the moment there is no dev plan in that direction. So I have never practiced Barista, nor Flamenco (the official Blender render manager). There is also another Blender add-on named Shot Manager that is more dedicated to rendering. You may want to have a look at it.

So regarding the question of exporting shots as markers, as you mentioned that is relying on the fact that shots should not overlap, which is at the exact other side from the philisophy of Shot Manager. I thought about it and I think that such a feature is not really relevant natively in the add-on. That said having a script doing that is quite easy to do, especially thanks to the API provided by Shot Manager. I can provide that to you, and you will just have to run that from your pipeline tools.

Let me know.

pesjakves commented 2 years ago

Hi @werwack,

Thank you for all the info! I would really appreciate the solution you proposed. I myself am probably not capable of writing such script and switching to the other Shot Manager would definitely be a bit tedious at the moment :) Would you be so kind and help me write the rendering script?

For the general usecase, I think that the UbiSM would really benefit some kind of a pipeline solution that would allow for something else then local rendering. Perhaps Flamenco integration would be possible in the future? This would greatly expand possibilities for many small Blender studios like mine, where we dont have any developer on the team. I understand that the addon's purpose right now is more about layout and storyboarding, not "final rendering".

Of course, this is my first project with UbiSM, so I probably dont fully comprehend your development decisions just yet :)

werwack commented 2 years ago

At the moment the architecture of the rendering is not made at all for distributed rendering. Indeed the final image of each shot is a composition of a rendering and a frame with the stamped info. Considerable work has to be done to change the approach.

Regarding the script to create the markers from the shots, it is available in the latest beta version: v2.1.24_Beta. Install this version then get the script from here (more convenient): https://github.com/ubisoft/shotmanager/blob/main/shotmanager/api/api_code_samples/api_export_shots_to_markers.py

To run it, once your project file is opened in Blender, go to the Scripting workspace and load that Python file in the editor. Then just press on the Run Script (button with the arrow on the right of the editor toolbar).