Start rendering from command line is nice way to render in Blender. I use this command line trick for the rendering process quite often. It's  easy to setup and now you can just copy paste command to the other machine and start rendering process easily.

It's powerful way to start whole rendering process. You can set multiple machines to render your project easily and you do not need "renderfarm" programs to make this trick for you. Of course if you have over 3-5 machines to use in rendering process I recommend to use Blender own network rendering or 3rd party render farm software. But I found this command line solution works better if you have something like 1-3 computers to use.

How?

  1. Make your blender file to ready for rendering like you always did. You can set output path etc. to the file or you can define those with command line. I usually make all ready in blender.
  2. Start Command Line, like Command Prompt.
  3. Write your commands and press Enter. There is couple examples below.
  4. Rendering is in process and you can grab a coffee...

Command Line Examples

You can control many things from commands. Check out all commands from blender wiki. Here is couple examples how to use commands.

Render frames 1-100
"C:YOUR_BLENDER_PATH" -b "C:YOUR_BLEND_FILE.blend" -s 1 -e 100

If you do not define start (-s) and end (-e) in your command, it will use those values from blender file. Many times this is fine if you use just one computer.
"C:YOUR_BLENDER_PATH" -b "C:YOUR_BLEND_FILE.blend"

If you want to use your own python script with rendering process
"C:YOUR_BLENDER_PATH" -b "C:YOUR_BLEND_FILE.blend" -s 1 -e 100 -P "C:YOUR_PYTHON_SCRIPT.py"

Use Your Network or NAS

If you have private network between your machines or you have NAS drive, you can use it to storage all renders. This make whole command a little bit easier to setup because you can just define that same command for your every machine. It's only couple copy paste commands and your rendering is in process...

Like in this "coin" animation I use my network Z drive to store all shared data between my machines:

"C:PortableAppsPortableAppsBlender52312blender" -b -s 257 -e 275 "Z:atelierPersonalProjectsCoinBlenderCoins-Commercial_010.blend" -P "Z:atelierPersonalProjectsCoinBlenderFakeMoveRender.py"

Links

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Reference/Command_Line

Published by Sakari in Blender