Simultaneous Cloud Rendering with Google

Recently I did an animation project in just 2 weeks. Well, It was too ambitious, but there were a lot of new tricks I used in there I thought will be worth sharing with you guys.

• CHALLENGE : Not enough time to render the project 
• SOLUTION : Rending simultaneously while working on the project using cloud computing

So let me tell you how I used Google Colab Cloud Computing Option to Render my Animation

SETTING-UP

Download the attachment I provided. (It is easy to use it rather than typing from scratch)

Go to Google Colab 

You will be greeted with a welcome screen. Go to Upload tab. chose the downloaded file and upload it.

This will add a bunch of codes to your notebook.

Let me give an overview of what I trying to do before giving you further instructions.

💡 If you don’t know what Google Colab is, think of it as a bridge that gives you access to another computer in some distant place(cloud). using that you can render any of your Blender projects(especially cycles). The best thing is while this thing doing its rendering, you can work on something else on your home computer. You don’t have to wait until rendering is finished to do other stuff on your computer.

So let’s give some commands to our cloud computer.

in the first cell, I am telling my Colab to download Blender. for that, I give them the link to that specific Blender version.

To find the version of Blender that your project uses go to this link and copy the link of the Blender version and replace the link here.

💡 IMPORTANT : Since our cloud computer runs Linux as its OS. you need to copy the link to the Linux version. Not Windows. Not Mac.

Before Running,

Go to Edit > Notebook Settings and make sure the following settings are there.

Now Run the cell. (click on that play icon in front of the cell)

Now we need to connect our Google Drive to the Colab. Google Drive will work as our storage in the cloud computer. This is where we upload our project files and also store our rendered frames.

Run the cell. You will ask to give permission to Colab to connect to gdrive. Allow it.

Now we can skip next 2 steps and give the command to Colab to install the Blender. But if we do this, every time you start a session on Colab you have to re-download Blender again. That will be an unnecessary waste of time and data. So let’s keep a copy of the downloaded Blender setup on our google drive.

So after connecting to google drive,

here first path/link tells which file to copy and the second path/link tells where to paste the file.

make sure you change the Blender version correctly.

To find the path easily, you can access google drive from the file tab in the sidebar or you can copy it from google drive.

Run the cell.

Now let’s copy the Blender setup back to Colab. Flip the paths you entered above.

Run the cell.

Now let’s install Blender. make sure to change the blender version correctly.

Run the cell.

While doing this you can come across a few errors. The next cell will get rid of those. So, Run it as well.

PREPARING YOUR FILE

Before Actually Rendering, Let’s see what we need to do to prepare our project for Colab Rendering.

You have to set all paths to relative in every texture, image, HDRi etc. Or an easier method will be to pack all those to .blend file.

File > External Data > Pack Resources

And if you have any simulation caches make sure to set them to disk cache. it will create the cache files in the .blend file directory. So that you can upload them with the .blend file.

Set the render output path to just “//”

Pick the file format you want. you can change this later in Colab if you desire.

Now after making sure no files are left out, upload all those files to your Google Drive.

RENDERING

Next cell we will tell colab where our .blend file is located. let’s call it “filename” for now.

Run the cell.

Now let’s render this. here I will explain the following code.

First, we run our blender. You will have to change the blender version here.

💡 Notice this not include “.tar.xz”. That is because this is the name of the directory where we install Blender.

After that, we tell the name of our application. “blender”.

💡 Notice that we not telling the format of the file. just the name.

• -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.

Now Run the cell.

AFTER RENDERING

After render is finished you have to Exit from the Colab Session. Go to the drop-down menu on the top right-hand side next to your connection status, Click “Manage Session” and Terminate the current session.

Now check your gdrive, you will see your renders.

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. I found some users claim it could render up to 5x faster, But I guess it depends on a number of other factors.

💡 I am new to using Colab. In fact I only used it for my “Jurassic World Raptor Chase” project. Most of my knowledge came from the channel “Microsingularity”. If you are interested in Colab or any Cloud computing, This guy got some awesome in depth tutorials.

Here are some helpful links:

Blender Releases 

Command Line Arguments 

Tell your thoughts, and questions below. Should I make a video on this?