bnrt 0.1

bnrt is 2 programs, a client and a server, that help render frames of animations over a network using multiple computers that all have Blender, a popular opensource 3D modeler/renderer, on them.

bnrt can run on Linux, Windows, and any other environment supported by both Java and Blender. Currently it is only set up to run on Linux and Windows, since those are the OSs I have running and active at the moment. But it is pretty trivial for me to add more OSs as long as they are supported by both Java and Blender.

To use bnrt you need to run the server on each system that you want to render frames on. This is done by either running the server shellscript or batch file. Or you can even just type in java -jar bnrtServer.jar at the command line.

After you have started a server on each system, then you need to run the client, which does not do any rendering. You can run a server and a client on the same machine. To run the client you need to run the following command from a command line:

java -jar bnrtClient.jar {file to render.blend} {first frame} {last frame} {server1} {server2} {server3....}

Please note that at the moment this is still pretty alpha code. I use it on my own network with up to 5 machines, mixed Windows and Linux as well as various processors, and it works quite well for me. YMMV, but if you run into a problem I will be happy to try to help you out as much as possible.