Howdy,
Right now blender doesn’t really have a render manager, so dealing with multiple renders can be tricky and you might end up using external tools to batch multiple renders.
That said, even if it’s surely not the most professional way to handle the problem, i guess the VSE could be used for this purpose since it allows to take scenes as strips.
The only problem is that the imported scenes are now rendered with the settings of the scene where VSE is currently being used.
A possible solution could be a checkbox that takes account of the scene/strip Render and Output settings.
Obviously this would lead to some problems like the need to disable transitions and any other effect, but a reasonable solution could be supporting only image formats (which are the only formats used in production anyway).
Just to be clear, this is nor a professional nor a final solution, but as a professional and a studio owner I’d consider this a GREAT step forward.
Let me know what you think about this and since i know nothing about code, if it’s something doable in these terms.
Even after all the videos created by the Blender animation team over all those years, it still boggles the mind something like a basic render manager is not a part of Blender.
There are a handful of commercial ones available on Blender Market, we’re using Render+ over here.
But there are other addons as well to keep your sanity.
for a first and basic implementation rendering different scenes with their own settings would basically cover all the other options, you would just need to duplicate your scene, change the parameters and add the new version in the VSE, so basically a “use scene strips render/output settings” checkbox would be enough for me.
If you have a partial GUI tool, that will only provide partial functionality, that only partially satisfies users’ needs. If you have a more complete GUI tool, then it just makes things more complex.
Rendering is a workflow function which should be automated. Automation is best carried out via a command line rather than having to point-and-click everything in a GUI. Blender already has the necessary functionality, you just have to learn how to use it.
The links you gave show something more complex than a GUI and stuff that only appeal to those that are on Linux board. So imho you hit on two of your own concerns.
There is a saying among professionals: “time is money”. Computers are programmable machines: you can get them to perform tasks automatically, particularly repetitive tasks. And they can do them faster and more accurately than humans can. And that lets you produce higher-quality work at a better cost-benefit ratio.
There is a lot you can do with it, particularly in conjunction with other tools. Such as, render to separate EXR frames, then feed them through other tools for further automated processing via their Python APIs before final video encoding. For example, GIMP has integrated support for deep floating-point pixel formats, so you don’t need to go through depth-reducing import/export steps and consequent quality loss.
With command-line automation, the capabilities of component tools add up to more than the sum of their parts!
i agree with you both actually, but i guess the best thing here is to have things done in a blender way, so not CLI but as first implementation just a couple of checkboxes.
anyone that can take the attention of a developer here?
Uhm i guess so, afterall addons are made in py so… but i know nothing about scripting, so i really don’t know if this can be done as an addon or it has to be part of the source code to work
There is already so much you can do through the Python API. It is great for saving lots of time in workflows, if you think beyond having to point and click to do everything.
