Overview

Blender is a tremendously useful open source 3D modeling program, and can be run on the HPC to create high fidelity visualizations of data and general 3D modeling. One of the benefits of running Blender on the HPC is you're able to transfer in a blender file containing your scene already configured and you can start the rendering process and leave it running overnight or during the week depending on the size of the rendering that needs to be done. Using command line rendering makes it possible to render from blender in a headless fashion, meaning no GPU is has to be allocated for your rendering. Another benefit of rendering on the supercomputer is large single frame Renderings can take up a significant amount of computer memory which HPC environments have to spare.

Table of Contents

Roadmap

The following images will walk you through

Starting an OOD remote desktop session
Downloading Blender
Writing a rendering python script
Downloading your results

Image Removed

Creation of OOD remote

OOD Remote Desktop Session

Downloading

Download and

configuring

Configure Blender

In this section we will download Blender, and unzip it, and then write a rendering python script

Download blender with this wget command from their clarkson mirror

Code Block
wget "https://mirror.clarkson.edu/blender/release/Blender2.93/blender-2.93.8-linux-x64.tar.xz"

This lets us download the Long Term Support version of blender from their homepage https://www.blender.org/download/lts/2-93/

Also make sure to uncompress the tar.xz at the end using this command

Code Block
tar -xf blender-2.93.8-linux-x64.tar.xz

Here is the code that we will put into the render.py file

Code Block

#get the blender python library
import bpy
#set the scene 
scene = bpy.context.scene
# set the output format as .tif
scene.render.image_settings.file_format = "TIFF"
# specify where the rendered image/s will go and what their names should be
scene.render.filepath = "./frames/render"
# set the engine to high performance CYCLES renderer
scene.render.engine = "CYCLES"
# set the resolution percentage down for testing, turn this up to 100 when it's worked once
scene.render.resolution_percentage = 25
# how many cpu threads we should create, this is a good default for Elgato, but should be higher on Puma and Ocelote
# set it to the number of CPU cores you have in your allocation
scene.render.threads = 15
scene.render.threads_mode = "FIXED"
# write a still frame render of the scene
bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=1)

Running the

blender scene render

Blender Scene Render from the

command line

Command Line

Once you have created/edited the render.py using a command line editor like vi, use this command to start the headless rendering

This will ensure that the blender file you have configured gets run in the background ( -b ) and that the render.py script is used as a python ( -P ) script