Quick Start

Quick Start

• Are you a blender artist that wants to get started animating?
• Are you a blender dev that wants to enhance your workflow/pipeline for your clients?
• Are you a blender plugin dev testing out your changes on a testing setup with test renders?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, this is for you!

Prerequisites:

Needed to be installed/configured on your local machine.

• python3
  • pyyaml
• blender (technically optional)
• docker
  • You may run ./scripts/install_docker_linux.sh if you are using a linux machine.

Set Up

Copy this repo's contents to your projects workdir. Place your blender files into blender/ and your image resource files into imgs/resources. Be sure to relink everything if you didn't already have relative paths to your images.

A stage is a specific rendering configuration, details in config.yaml, consisting of at least one blender file to be rendered. The information held in such a stage includes:

scene:
  buffer_frames: 1-9,11-20      # frames 1 through 20 except 10
  force_update: false           # force frame to rerender, even if file exists
  render_output: 'imgs/buffer/' # where to put the output of that file
  engine: CYCLES                # EEVEE support coming soon
  blend_file: scene.blend       # the blend file in question
  render_format: PNG            # what format the output should be in
  blender_flags: ''             # parameters for blender to be used in the docker call

for blender_flags:, use flags found for blender arguments found here

In this project, Stage scene refers to the blend file that contains the models/textures to be build, and stage edit includes the blender file with post processing.

Render

0. (optional) Set up the Docker image locally (this will take some time).

docker build -t blender-pipeline scripts/

1. If you just downloaded this project, first set the paths of your working directory.

make set_paths

You can verify the output of this with make get_paths

2. Render the scene stage (scene.blend - the blender file with the content to be rendered, longest part of pipeline)

make scene_render

3. Render the post processing stage (edit.blend - the blender file with the post processing steps of the VFX pipeline)

make edit_render

Raw, individual frames will populate in imgs/buffer/ without post processing. A video file will be found in imgs/out/ with post processing.