Microsoft Now Allows Blender Animation Workload On Azure Batch
2 min. read
Published on
Share this article
Improve this guide
Read our disclosure page to find out how can you help MSPoweruser sustain the editorial team Read more
Last year, Microsoft announced the public preview Azure Batch which provides job scheduling and resource management as a service which is critical to compute-intensive workloads to Azure. You just need to load the application on Azure and it will take care of the deployment, job management, resourcing, scheduling, disaster recovery, data movement, dependency management and all the other plumbing required to run jobs in the cloud.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the release of a set of samples that enable you to run a Blender workload on Azure Batch. Blender is used by individuals and small studios for photorealistic rendering, fast rigging, amazing simulations and game creation. Azure Batch can help, reducing the complexity and the time needed for rendering using Blender.
We are releasing two components available via GitHub which will enable anyone to offload their rendering to be processed using the Azure Batch service. The first component is the server-side component that uses our .Net SDK and contains the logic to split an animation job into a set of tasks to be processed on individual Virtual Machines. The second component is the client-side component written in Python that will allow you to manage the rendering job using a UI tool natively installed in Blender. This plug-in allows you to manage
- Jobs – submit jobs, download outputs, cancel jobs, download job logs and monitor status.
- Pools – create pools, delete pools, assign jobs to current running pools or use dynamic pools for jobs.
- Batch Portal – a web UI that allows you to manage jobs and tasks individually, diagnose logs, errors, download job and task outputs, and re-submit failed jobs and tasks. It will also allow you to get performance telemetry to allow you to optimize your jobs.
- Assets – keep track of what assets (User files, digital content, textures, lighting, etc.) have been uploaded to Azure Storage, so when submitting jobs with the same assets, it will only upload assets that don’t exist in the cloud or upload assets that have been modified.
Read more about it here.
