CURRENTLY, THERE ARE BUILDS FOR WINDOWS AND UBUNTU (BOTH 64 BITS) AVAILABLE. IF YOU WANT TO BUY B-RENDERON BUT ARE ON A DIFFERENT PLATFORM/LINUX DISTRIBUTION, PLEASE CHECK WITH ME VIA P.M. FIRST. THANKS.

Why I created it?

I work every day at a small animation studio, using Blender (among other software), and then I come home and use Blender some more for personal projects. Both at my job and at home, I found that I, and the other animators I work with, were relying more and more on command line scripts to render, both because of performance improvement (i.e. less memory consumption, less rendering-crashes with some add-ons, and generally faster renders) and because we often times need to leave multiple blend files to render overnight or over the weekend.

But writing command line scripts can be quite tedious and error prone (typing errors are often times lead to a render missed). That’s why I developed B-Renderon, a standalone program with a nice and handy graphical interface to render multiple blend files from command line, without bothering with (or even seeing, unless you want to) the command line.

While developing it, several ideas came to mind to expand and improve upon it, and it ended up being something definitely cooler and more useful than I had envisioned.

Who can benefit from it?

In my opinion, pretty much everyone using Blender on the supported platforms, and making renders with it, would benefit from using B-Renderon. In my experience, once you have adopted a tool like B-Renderon in your rendering workflow, it ranges from being handy to feeling indispensable, depending on the projects you are dealing with. Simply dragging and dropping a bunch of blends onto B-Renderon, hitting render, and coming the next day to see them all rendered is just satisfying. And the flexibility of being able to easily batch render blends scenes / cameras / viewlayers or different blends with different blender versions, or to quickly set up different frame ranges and render them, to name a few, turns tedious processes into a breeze. It can also help immensely in systems with multiple GPUs, to speed up rendering using different gpu’s in parallel instances rendering different frames at the same time.

Features

Supports Drag and drop of blend files to add them into the queue and to reorder them

Has a per-file mode option to either render as animation or to enter a list of frames to be rendered

Allows you to set different versions of Blender to render different files in your queue.

Allows you to choose which scene(s), viewlayer(s), and camera(s) to use for each job.

Allows you to set the frame range to be rendered, with a convenience feature to split the range into different jobs in the queue.

Supports interrupting rendering and resuming it later, automatically starting from the frame after the last saved one

Allows you to have different named queues and quickly switch between them
Stores a log file for each queue with useful information such as Start and End time and date of every render, average rendering time per frame, total queue processing time, scene name and amount of rendered frames for each job.

Can show, during rendering, Blender’s live log / console

You can easily open any blend in your queue with the appropriate blender version, open the blend path, open the output path.

Allows you to add extra command-line arguments, in case you want to, for example, change the render engine, resolution, execute a python command, etc.

etc

Version 3.1:

New named queues management workflow, allowing the user to quickly switch between different named queues
The text log is now per-named queue
New render scheduler, allowing the user to set start and or end times to automatically start/stop renders.
When multiple jobs are selected in the queue, the scenes, viewlayers and cameras windows will now allow you to read all blends and show combined results and choose from that
Added total queue processing time to the status bar and text log
Added settings to choose which program to view the renders with for videos and images / sequences
Some third party add-ons don’t let blender close after rendering via command line. In previous versions of b-renderon this could cause that users with those addons enabled would have b-renderon render an item and never proceed to the next one because it didn’t get the signal that the render finished. The solution was to activate the setting “use factory settings” to bypass 3rd party addons, but that wasn’t always ideal. Now, B-renderon will detect when a render is complete and if Blender isn’t closing by itself, B-renderon will close it and proceed with the next element in the queue.
New context option to change the alignment of the contents of a queue column
The “open blend” button will now respect the blender version assigned the selected job
New context option to enable / disable items in the queue to omit them when rendering. (Also accessible via the shortcut M)
Added “extra arguments” feature to watch folders, especially useful for using the “overwrites off – place holders on” preset in home network renders
Lots of fixes and improvements everywhere

Version 3.1.1:

Fixed regression in 3.1 that could cause the UI to freeze when rendering heavy blends
Added option in the settings to keep the pc awake while rendering, on by default. This was already the behavior previously, but there was no way to disable it.
Fixed crash in the frame range window when entering frame limits to an empty field
Fixed issue for systems with multiple displays with different scaling that occasionally caused the UI to look weird when them monitors came back from standby
Various other smaller fixes

Version 3.1.2:

Fixed regression in 3.1.1 that caused wrong number of rendered frames reporting for scenes with file output nodes