Blender

How to use Blender on Shamu to render your scenes or animations.

First you will need to upload your *.blend file to your home directory.

If you need more than 128GB of memory request access to the bigmem queue. Email your request to rcsg@utsa.edu. If less than 128GB of memory you can use the "all.q" queue. In the submit script below, if less than 128GB of memory is required change "#$ -q bigmem.q" to "#$ -q all.q".

If you do not already have one, request a /work/abc123 directory. Once created create a subdirectory called "blender" and place your .blend file and another other files needed for rendering.

[abc123@login ~] cd /work/abc123
[abc123@login ~] mkdir blender
[abc123@login ~] mv ~/*.blend /work/abc123/blender

Create a submit file and edit accordingly. The contents below are using the Blender benchmark demo.

#!/bin/bash
#
#$ -cwd
#$ -q bigmem.q
#$ -pe threaded 100
. /etc/profile.d/modules.sh
module load blender
cd /work/abc123/blender
blender -noaudio -b benchmark.blend -o ./output/ -s 1 -e 100 -t 100 -a

The blender command above "-s 1 -e 100" means start at frame 1 and end at frame 100. "-t 100" means to use 100 cores. "-a" means run until completion. You MUST use the same number with "-pe threaded XXX" as the "-t XXX value". If you do not you will potentially overload the node.

Now submit your job to the cluster:

qsub benchmark.qsub

Now you have a directory with a bunch of images but you wanted a video file. Not a problem! We can use command line tools to encode the images into a MP4 file playable on any modern computer.

From the login node we use a software tool called ffmpeg to convert the images. The instructions below take a set of images (named 0001.png, 0002.png, 0003.png, etc..) and encodes them using the H264 video codec. Edit accordingly for your images:

[abc123@login ~] cd /work/abc123/blender/output
[abc123@login ~] ffmpeg -i %04d.png -vcodec libx264 video.mp4

-- AdminUser - 10 Apr 2018