Blender on Biowulf
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.
Blender on Biowulf is meant for command-line rendering. The .blend file should be created outside of Biowulf, as none of the nodes have support for OpenGL, required for running the GUI.
Documentation
Important Notes
- Module Name: Blender (see the modules page for more information)
- Multithreaded
- Example files in BLENDER_EXAMPLES
Interactive job
Interactive jobs should be used for debugging, graphics, or applications that cannot be run as batch jobs.
Allocate an interactive session and run the program.
Sample session (user input in bold):
[user@biowulf]$ sinteractive --cpus-per-task=8 salloc.exe: Pending job allocation 46116226 salloc.exe: job 46116226 queued and waiting for resources salloc.exe: job 46116226 has been allocated resources salloc.exe: Granted job allocation 46116226 salloc.exe: Waiting for resource configuration salloc.exe: Nodes cn3144 are ready for job [user@cn3144 ~]$ module load blender [user@cn3144 ~]$ cp $BLENDER_EXAMPLES/fishy_cat.blend . [user@cn3144 ~]$ blender -t ${SLURM_CPUS_ON_NODE} -noaudio --background fishy_cat.blend --render-output run/output --render-frame 1 [user@cn3144 ~]$ exit salloc.exe: Relinquishing job allocation 46116226 [user@biowulf ~]$
Batch job
Most jobs should be run as batch jobs.
Create a batch input file (e.g. blender.sh). For example:
#!/bin/bash module load blender blender -t ${SLURM_CPUS_ON_NODE} -noaudio --background file.blend --render-output run/output
Submit this job using the Slurm sbatch command.
sbatch [--cpus-per-task=#] [--mem=#] blender.sh