If you’ve ever found yourself with the need to render multiple Blender projects overnight, this is the program for you!
RenderPilot is a render manager for Blender, and if you’re working on a project with a lot of long render times, this little thing is about to become your best friend.
Maybe you’ve been working on a huge project all day, and you’ve only got one workstation. You may want to save all your rendering until later, perhaps overnight, when you’re not actually using the workstation. That way, your computer is being used 24 hours a day to it’s fullest potential.
Renderpilot brings that functionality to Blender. I’ve seen a couple other render managers for Blender, but none of them did exactly what I wanted. I always set up my .blend files with the correct output paths and frame ranges, so they are ready to render as soon as I’m about to step away from my computer. I just wanted a batch renderer that was basically a list of projects. It would render one project, and as soon as that finished, go right on to the next project in the list. No setting frames or output paths, just drag the projects in and press “go”. It could run through projects all night without any input from me.
Created by Blender artist wigglyframes, this simple program was just what I needed. For a while I was doing this in the command prompt on Windows 7. I wasn’t a huge fan of this, even though it was relatively simple. I wanted a drag-and-drop UI. I found RenderPilot on BlenderArtists just as I was thinking I may have to learn enough programming to make my own UI for the command prompt functions I was using.
What a great tool! Thanks, wigglyframes! Below you’ll find a short tutorial on how to use it and the links to download it. Apparently work is underway on a v2.0 but it’s not ready for release yet. The current v1.0 is exactly what I need,anyway. Although that progress bar would be pretty cool!
Also, this program is Windows only. I’ve asked wigglyframes if I could help facilitate getting it ported to Mac and Linux, but I haven’t heard back yet. Anyone have any ideas on how we can help get this to Mac and Linux users? Maybe there’s already something similar out there for those platforms? Please share in the comments if there is! I’ll update this post if we find something or if I hear more from wigglyframes.
Links to download RenderPilot:
- Program : https://www.dropbox.com/s/ajjz9gigti…Pilot.exe?dl=0
- English manual: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q4cinadenc…t_Eng.pdf?dl=0
- German manual: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fs9vrkjaik…t_Ger.pdf?dl=0
Wow this is really interesting post.Glad I found this website and this article. Thanks!
You might be interested in these command-line tools https://github.com/ldo/render-useful I did for doing renders and getting info about .blend files. I did the stereo function before Blender had its multi-views feature added.
Very cool, Lawrence, thanks!
save Blend files with a specific Scene as the focus and you can create a BAT file for Windows and just double click that. Here is mine for rendering 4 different Blend files, starting with the CD line, then blender -b, followed by the 4 Blend files, each file path ending with the -a
cd C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender
blender -b “C:\Users\Brian\Documents\blenderFiles\_MMTM\models\ppMan\ppMan-closeup.blend” -a “C:\Users\Brian\Documents\blenderFiles\_MMTM\models\ppMan\ppMan-XtremeCloseup.blend” -a “C:\Users\Brian\Documents\blenderFiles\_MMTM\models\batman\BATMAN-closeup.blend” -a “C:\Users\Brian\Documents\blenderFiles\_MMTM\models\batman\BATMAN-XtremeCloseup.blend” -a
Hi Brian,
Thanks for this, but this is exactly the reason I love Renderpilot. I was doing this process directly in the command prompt window, not even saving the BAT file, and I felt it was taking way too long. Saving the BAT file adds even another step. Then when you want to render 4 more projects, you have to do this process all overr, copy/pasting file paths, saving a BAT file, etc. Renderpilot I just drag/drop, press button. Much faster.