Speed Up Your Blender Renders with Free Google Colab

Google Colab is a Free tool you can use to Render Your Blender Animations.

In this video, I talk about how to set up your blender project and How to use Colab to render your animation project without any issues.

• Colab Template Notebook: check attachments
• Blender Releases: https://download.blender.org/release/
• Blender Command Line Arguments: https://bit.ly/cmdlineArg

Video Link: https://youtu.be/cGcVKHpbKQo

Final Cell Description

• -b  = Run in Background
• $filename = which .blend file we need to run
• -noaudio  = no audio in this project
• -E = Render Engine
• -o = where the file is going to save and its name. After the final “/”, you can give your render file a name.
• -s  and  -e  = Start and End frame
• -a = animation
• -F = File format of the rendered output. This will overwrite your settings in the .blend file.
• CUDA = you can tell which type of GPU you want to use for rendering. You can change this to “OPTIX” if you prefer.

PROS AND CONS

Remember this is a free cloud computing option. So it definitely comes with both advantages and disadvantages. Yes, you can upgrade to a paid version but if you want to pay for rendering your product, then there are plenty of better options out there than Colab.

Pros:

• All you need is to have your browser open. Don’t need to wait until Rendering is done to do other performance-heavy work.
• Better privacy for your projects. Compare to something like “Sheepit Render farm”
• You can use it for Baking Simulations as well.

Cons:

• always need to have Browser open. (Paid version you can close your browser)
• Need to check the rendering once in a while. If it detects no activity, it usually disconnects you from the session.
• Limited time for a session. This only gives you a few hours per Day to use Colab. You have to wait for a GPU session. Connecting to a CPU session is just wasting time.
• Not Crazy fast. At least in my case I only found it 90%-200% faster. Yes, it could take more time than your computer sometimes.