Xgrid and Blender part 3

Well, hopefully the final installment of the Xgrid and Blender saga. So, now I started using gridstuffer, a very useful app. By setting up a text file, and giving it some lines of code you want to submit to the xgrid, it'll render the files to where you specify in the blender file. Unfortunately Blender can only really render to the tmp folder because for some reason it has trouble with permissions in ALL other folders (doh!).

So I finally tried a couple of other commands in blenders command line (which I put in the text file) to see if I could get that to tell blender where to render to. Success! It actually renders to the "Output" folder which you specify in gridstuffer (or generally in Xgrid!).

So the final command looks like this:



/Applications/Blender/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/blender -b KitchenTopFreeTree2.blend -o //kitchen -F TGA -x 1 -f 1
/Applications/Blender/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/blender -b KitchenTopFreeTree2.blend -o //kitchen -F TGA -x 1 -f 2
/Applications/Blender/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/blender -b KitchenTopFreeTree2.blend -o //kitchen -F TGA -x 1 -f 3

the -o specifies the folder and file to save. The -F is the file type, -x specifies whether to add numbers to the end. The -f specifies the frame number!

So the blender file is in the input directory, and the // defines it is in the root of the output directory.

Looking at how the whole thing works, I think the machine you submit it all from is the machine which distributes and collects all the files needed. The server just works out which machines to send it to. I don't think that the files have to be on a share? I shall test this theory out.

So the only pre-requsits are that the machines are on the xgrid network, and they have blender installed in the right directory with the right name (case-sensitive)

References:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Render/Command_Line_Options