Release v0.3.1

v0.3.1

Mostly bugfixes for Windows platform

• AWS provider:
  • Uploading the S3 data
  • Starting the Manager (user-data issue)
• Addon:
  • Fixed issue with receiving & displaying the logs
  • Blend file validator relative path issue

Release v0.3.0

v0.3.0

Release video: https://youtu.be/PBa5u7w0FXo

Providers:

• AWS cloud provider
• Cloud providers price get per instance type
• Receive cloud instance logs
• Local provider

Addon:

• Moved provider manager/agent type to addon preferences
• Render memory constraint to the scene settings
• Show calculated cloud prices
• When Manager is active - switches to it's API to get resources
• Show the instance/service logs in separated window
• Show task additional info in a better way
• Checks available Blender version from newest to oldest
• Automatically download compositing instead of huge render result
• Task actions to manually download render and compose results
• Task preview now uses temp directory and downloads previews in background
• List of the Agents
• Button to remove any Agent
• UI shows status of the Agent

Manager:

• Compositing support (for now executed on Manager, but will be moved to the Agent #65)
• Saving to the user defined format and file output
• Provide logs from the running service
• Rewrote the task processes for better stability
• Exposed API to show the controlled resources

Agent:

• Provide logs from the running service

Bugfixes:

• Addon: download only the related to the opened project task results
• Manager: fixed a couple of deadlocks and stopping process to not recreate the destroyed Agents
• Manager: improved error task state handling
• Agent: render results was one-layer exr, instead of multilayer ones

Additional:

• Prepared CI to test the Addon and API on test-project (useful as automation examples)
• Improved Wiki with automation articles and more info about BlendNet
• New test project release v0.3 with compose support
• More debugging info

Release v0.2

Second release of BlendNet!

This release was focused on improving the user experience and stabilizing the features.

Features:

• Calculation of the actual render time (#1)
• Control the running tasks if blendnet engine is selected (#1)
• Support for square samples (#1)
• Background upload for manager task deps (#1)
• Optimized start of the instances (#1)
• Automatic agent recreation if type was changed (#1)
• Task control interface (#1)
• Save and init load tasks for the Manager (#1)
• Automatic termination of the Agents when Manager instance is stopped (#1)
• Show overall percentage of task in UI (#1)
• Automatic download of the Manager tasks results (#1)
• Enabling denoise data store if denoising is enabled (#1)
• ERROR task state to provide feedback to user (#2)
• Windows support for Addon (#17), thanks @blumem
• Ability to choose the blender version for render (#22)
• Information about invalid quota configs on addon settings page (#18)
• Support for new Mantaflow fluid/smoke simulator caches (#21)
• Button to destroy the Manager when it stopped (#26)
• Automatic way to choose cheap VMs for agents (#37)

Bugfixes:

• Fixed issue with local result sha1 calculation
• Fixed issue with always completed tasks & naming conflict (#2)
• Removing old result blobs only when merge was completed (#8)
• No need to make preview if nothing was rendered (#8)
• Fixed issue with downloading file to not existing directory (#23)

Release v0.1

First release of BlendNet!

This release to show the the concept are working well.

Features:

• Prepared Blender UI, Manager & Agent
• It's all working on GCP provider
• If some Agent is terminating - Manager getting it's results and reassigning the least work to another subtask
• There is some cost-optimizations (Agents will be stopped if there is no tasks or Manager is going to shutdown)
• Tested on simple project - and looks like working

Known issues:

• Tested only on Linux - hopefully should work on MacOSX and maybe will work on Windows (but expect errors).
• Initial configuration is quite hard for someone who never used GCP gcloud utility
• Tested only on GCP with default project - so if you have some interesting configs, it could fail
• Agents will have external ip to download external resources (updates, blender binary)
• Some settings are not working - for example you can’t specify the existing manager IP, so only dynamic creation on GCP
• Auto-shutdown of the Manager - so you have to stop it manually
• Save of the Manager/Agent tasks information between runs - do not shutdown Manager until you get all the required information from it
• Simple auto download the results - right now they are downloaded only if you previewing them
• Not tested render with dependencies (images,caches) - so could contain some minor issues
• Interface is responsive - but relies on user interaction, so if it’s not updating - just fly mouse around it
• Providers interface is not looks good - will be rewritten
• Animation (multiple frames) tasks creation glitches (sometimes stuck for some reason on some frames) and slow, but could be used somehow)
• No Manager tasks control Addon interface