pampanelson/blender_farm

A fully fledged remote blender farm written in NodeJS

Blender Farm

A fully fledged remote blender farm written in NodeJS

This personnal project of mine is a server designed to be deployed on my home serveur. It runs multiple GPUs for 3D Rendering with Blender, and I need a way to automate rendering jobs from my workstation.

I will try my best to make it configurable so that anyone could technically deploy it on their own server. Please email me if you have questions. For suggestions, use the Github issues.

Installing the project

Quick procedure to install the project on any Unix system.

Recommanded OS: Any Ubuntu-based distrubution, 18.04 and above. You will need a graphical interface in order for Blender to accept rendering, even if the server then runs headless.

Install the latest Node and Yarn releases

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.11/install.sh | bash
bash  # reload terminal
nvm install --lts
curl -o- -L https://yarnpkg.com/install.sh | bash
bash  # reload terminal
node -v  # verify installation
yarn -v  # verify installation

Clone the project

Go in the parent folder where you want the project to live.

git clone https://github.com/ScottishCyclops/blender_farm
cd blender_farm
yarn  # install the dependencies

Configure it

Create the file config.json at the root of the project. In your favorite editor, write something similar to the following. Under blenderExec, write the actual path to your blender executable. The rest can be left as is.

{
  "certPath": "/ssl/blender.local.crt",
  "keyPath": "/ssl/blender.local.key",
  "port": 4434,
  "blenderExec": "/usr/sbin/blender"
}

Generate a self-signed certificate. Press Enter until the end, no need to input anything.

You will need the openssl command line utility (installed by default on most Linux platforms).

yarn genkeys

Start it

yarn start

Hope you have fun with it !

Scott