Installing Flamenco in 5 minutes

Read the full announcement at: studio.blender...
In this video, dr. Sybren (lead software developer) shows how to set up Blender's render farm software Flamenco in just five minutes.
Links from the video:
- Flamenco: flamenco.blend...
- Blender Chat Flamenco channel: blender.chat/c...
Flamenco is the Free and Open Source render manager used at Blender Studio.

[@BlenderStudio]

Flamenco 3.1 has just been released! Grab it fresh from flamenco.blender.org/

[@BenleGentil]

I've been using it (on a single workstation) for 3 weeks now and it completely changed my workflow. I know it's not the intented use but the ability to send a render job (single frame) and keep working on the blender file while it renders has been life-changing for my productivity. Many thanks!

[@nikolasgarcianikomanga]

how do you include the pc that runs as manager as worker as well?

[@BenleGentil]

@@nikolasgarcianikomanga you run the worker app on it

[@valleybrook]

Very interesting. I'm encouraged to buy a better computer with better GPU and still have some use of my current one, this by including it in the Flamenco setup

[@BenleGentil]

@@valleybrook 100% I would encourage you to have a look at Deadline. It's a bit more involved to set up but it works a lot better than Flamenco. I had a lot of issue with the latter and since I've moved to Deadline it's been working as intented.

[@valleybrook]

@@BenleGentil Thanks for the tip, will check it!

[@nicholasmasterton7297]

Incredibly easy to set up, I am up and rendering on the network in no time, thank you so much for this free software. Absolute game changer from an absolute legend!

💜

[@unboring7057]

Excellent tutorial, thank you! I've tried and failed to integrate Flamenco into my workflow in the past, and now it's a breeze with the improvements to the onboarding along with this great tutorial. Thanks again!

[@DECODEDVFX]

This looks really great Sybren.

Thanks!

[@AlfredTsaizer]

Awesome! I've been looking forward to easy setup flamenco for years now! Can't wait to give it a try!

[@sinlesscracker3078]

Thank you for this, it was really helpful.

[@Loopinglovers]

love this - using this to set up a render que, so my workstation renders my jobs over night in a neat que. thank you so much. also impressed how easy this is to use

[@smilgu]

Thank You! Flamenco is an amazing stuff!

[@mrmacnoobster]

Would love a video going over how to create custom jobs or tweak the default one. The JavaScript is a bit intimidating to go through...

[@FirstLast_Nba]

I'll give it a go.

[@dotunebraen]

This is gonna be great, imma try it out

[@gemmamrull314]

Thanks a lot! I still remember the whole explaination at BCon19..... XD

[@marcelo.coutinho]

tank you very much!! im installed it and worked very well!!

[@user-xs6vl7gr9w]

Is it possible to run Flamenco cross-platform? I am currently using Windows10 as a workstation, and Linux computers as render farm.

[@hugoantunesartwithblender]

I have also the same question and i also use tge same setup

Yes, it should be possible. Hasn't been tested much, though, as I've focused mostly on pure-Windows and pure-Linux at first. I'll update the docs on the Flamenco site today, to explain how it should be done. In short, it requires some setup to tell Flamenco that "F:\Flamenco" on Windows is the same as "/media/nas/flamenco" on Linux.

[@user-xs6vl7gr9w]

@ Do I need to write new flamenco worker YAML file to change flamenco path on Linux?

[@user-xs6vl7gr9w]

UPDATE: Flamenco 3.0 Official version supports cross-platform without big issues.

[@aegisgfx]

background GPU rendering on windows appears to be impossible, I had absolutely no success getting it working. Does anyone have any solutions?

[@kaczorefx]

What exactly is the function of the shared storage folders? Did the Blender project actually need to be in the shared projects folder? I'd assume the action of submitting the scene as a job to flamenco would create a copy of the project stored in a shared location, I'm guessing in the projects folder. But if so, the original project can be stored anywhere, doesn't have to be shared? Also the software folder - is it just so that we can run the worker.exe on any of the machines without having to copy it to each machine, or is it actually being used by flamenco and the folder MUST be named "software0?"

[@ogre1890]

I’m doing this on a Mac and for some reason am not able to get the set up assistant to find the path to the blender application, even if I put it in manually. Anyone have a solution?

[@cg1582]

Amazing

[@AlmazovS]

Is it possible to use workers in different OS? Like Linux / macOS / Windows

[@89ZY]

thank you very much

[@Denatnael599]

How can you make a NAS,

[@DEM3RZ]

Would it be possible to use this to queue up Octane Engine renders if using Octane Blender? I'm guessing this works seamlessly with Workbench, Eevee, and Cycles

[@3Ds-Learning]

Wow really nice I love it ❤️ 😍

[@djurovicgiorgio]

Please please please I need this exact video for silicon Macs… it’ll take you 10 minutes to make, please I have no idea what I’m doing on my own

[@AlexisRivera3D]

It says failed for me everytime

[@scottb721]

What needs to be done on the worker PC that's doing the actual rendering

[@norbertszalko]

I'm sorry, but I don't really understand. Is Flamenco a server park where I can render my larger projects for FREE? Like SheepIt Render Farm? :D Or does this use my machine only in a web environment?

[@Dead_Last]

Its an application to communicate with a render farm. Where managers can give feedback to the artists.

By running the Flamenco software, you create your own render farm from your own machines.

[@PabloVazquez]

Flamenco is not a service, it's a render farm manager software. You can use it to easily send renders from within Blender and render on machines that you have access to. You can read more about it at flamenco.blender.org/

[@norbertszalko]

I understand now, thank you.

[@yudizs4455]

There was an error running the command: C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 3.3\blender.exe: version check took too long

[@sybren.blender]

That means that running `blender.exe --version` took more than 10 seconds. Not sure what can cause that -- usually it's done within a second.

[@TheHamsterJourney]

help me please. when starting the worker on the second computer, I don’t render on the command line, but it shows the following error - WRN Blender could not be found, Flamenco Manager will have to supply a full path

[@sybren.blender]

You have to make sure that Blender is installed on every computer. Also this is a warning, not an error, so as long as Flamenco Manager is configured with the path where Blender is located, it should work just fine.

[@peripheralarbor]

Thanks for the walkthrough. I am unclear, is this just for the user/client machine? How do you integrate the worker nodes in the farm?

User/client just needs Blender + the add-on. The worker nodes just need to have Blender installed and run flamenco-worker.exe -- if they're on the same network as the Manager, they'll automatically find it. Everybody needs access to the shared storage, because that's where all the files are.

[@rushilvasudevadesigns]

Can it be used on a remote PC and we access it remotely

[@MasqueArt]

probably, if you have shared folder through GoogleDrive or something similiar, when the worker PC sees it, it should probably start, but you gotta try it.

[@leonardovallone]

It would be grear to have some automation, either built in (preferable) or better than crowdrender, for distributed stills rendering

[@BlenderStudio]

If you want & are able to help, that would be fantastic. The "job types" system of Flamenco 3 is brand new, and allows for much easier & far-reaching customisation than ever possible on its predecessors. The documentation on the Flamenco website gives a good starting point. They aren't complete yet, so if you have any questions drop by on Blender Chat (link in the video description). ~~ Sybren

[@leonardovallone]

Oh, Flamenco is great but it´s not intended for stills as far as I know. I hope not to be missunderstood, Blender is great and the developers have all of my admiration. I do my cycles distributed rendering overlapping various seeds of a same frame when needed but it woud be great to have something a bit more elaborate. Just saying, other than that the video is great, the explanation is super good and Flamenco seems to be awesome.

@@leonardovallone my point is that it can't do stills now, but you can make it do stills. It is very much intended to be expanded in this way.

[@hugoantunesartwithblender]

@@leonardovallone You can render one until 200 samples, then another blend file with sample offset of 200 to 500, render both in flamenco and then merge them with the bpy, so yes, you can use it as a still renderfarm. I havent tested it yet, but since it was possible to do this by command line before (batch rendering with the command line) , it will be possible using flamenco too

[@BenleGentil]

@ I don't understand why it cannot do stills. If I do 1 frame per job (not trying to split the samples) it seems to work just fine on my end

[@flmly-shortstoriesbyfamili2262]

Slaves cant find the manager on other PCs. I have no firewalls or nothing. I have tried for hours and cant figure it out. This is not so straightforward.

Check the log output of the Manager, it may mention something about port 1900 being unavailable. This can be caused by Spotify, be sure to shut that down.

[@flmly-shortstoriesbyfamili2262]

@ i figured it out. I just manually created the slave .yaml and told it where the address of the master was. My suggestion is that when the master generates the .yaml for the master during installation you can just have it generate the slave as well. This is the best render farm i have used so far for blender. Absolutely gorgeous and intuitive UI and great render service. It was not able to render more than 60 frames after i tested with 7 slaves. It got stuck towards the end. Looking forward to final stable build and future upgrades. Awesome work again to the team!

[@jnggraphics]

@@flmly-shortstoriesbyfamili2262 hello how did you made the yaml for slave?

[@Revenkin]

Omg what is this magic??

[@Ahmed-Saleh92]

What took me hrs to figure is that you need to map network drive on each PC and assign the same letter on all PCs otherwise you will keep getting an error that other (worker) PCs can't find the directory of your files

[@RyouMisaki17]

do you know how are you supposed to map that if you have a worker on a mac?

[@Ahmed-Saleh92]

@@RyouMisaki17 No, I am sorry I have no idea how to do it on a mac

[@jnggraphics]

@@d.m.9690 how did you create yaml for the worker?

[@musemekonen4806]

🔥🔥🔥🔥

[@jg-jsbg4725]

INSTALLING FLAMENCO IN 5 MINUTES

YES. AND RUNNING IT TOO. WHY ARE WE SHOUTING?

[@lorenzoascani]

help. Wonderful addon. I need it. But when i run Manager.exe nothing happend! I run it like admin but no borsewer windows pup up. In my firewall I set up to allow Flamenco to connect. Win 11. Maybe someone had the same problem? Flamenco 3.4

[@voxeldeev]

Just checking, does the most recent version of flamenco work with blender 3.4 or 3.3?

[@chielsaro2501]

What is the use for the option "Fetch Job Types"?

It fetches the supported job types from Flamenco Manager. These are not hard-coded, so you can actually create your own type of Flamenco job (for example for doing tiled image rendering, or running physics simulations).

[@conservatif741]

* Can I use two PC connected with LAN equipped with different GPU's? (4090 / 24GB and other 4070 / 16GB.) * If project needs over 16GB (very often 20-24GB) of VRAM, would it use only PC with 4090? * How installed addons, would there come a problems when rendering with two PC's? With (In SheepIt-farm rendering there was no textures in some addon-objects.)

[@grvideotv]

how do I put it on the blender 4.1? thank you!

[@antoonsorg]

Awesome can it installed on a Windows 2016-2019 or Linux server?

[@geekonarium]

i rendered the whole night. Next morning it has crashed :( Any ideas about the reason?

[@Ecceptor]

Is it just me, I need to pack the blend file first before sending to render? Otherwise the texture would be missing

Flamenco should find the dependencies automatically, shouldn’t need to pack.

[@Ecceptor]

@ Yeah the old version I used doesn't have this problem.

@@Ecceptor it uses a slightly improved version of BAT, so it should work just fine. I’ll release Flamenco 3.2 soon with some improvements. If that still doesn’t work well, please report a bug.

[@mattburkey]

Really excited about the potential for Flamenco as I've been perserveing Loki for so long. I get as far as "Submit to Flamenco" and it says "Error performing BAT pack". The plug in doesn't change from "Investigating your files".

[@rainertrummer]

had this too, in my case it was about linked files that came in with both absolute and relative paths. You can see this in the console output window. After making all of them the same (absolute I think) the submitting worked

[@mattburkey]

@@rainertrummer Thanks for this info. I looked into this myself as I use linked assets a lot. However, even if I create a new scene (default cube, camera, light), save it and send to Flamenco I get the same error. I'll try new builds in due course, but from what I've seen from those who can get it to work, it's exactly what I need!

Be sure to try the latest version, I've fixed an issue that caused this error.

[@mattburkey]

Hi @, thank you so much for this fix. It started working fine for me on my workstation and has been fantastic for queueing up renders overnight, so long as I store my main scene on a local hard drive. However, I've built up a little render farm at work with some old computers. If I store my main scene on a mapped network drive (X:\ in this case which is also where all my linked assets are installed and all machines can see this) I get the previous "Error performing BAT pack" error. If I save my main scene on a local drive C:\ or D:\ (all linked assets remain on X:\) then it submits without any issues. This is not an ideal solution though as I want to store my files in one place, the mapped X drive, so that I don't end up with duplicate files and lose track of revisions. The error I get is: Error performing BAT pack: 'X:\\test.flamenco.blend' is not in the subpath of '\\\\server_PCname\\D\\Work' OR one path is relative and the other is absolute. The drive "X:\" is mapped to the folder "\\server_PCname\D\Work" which is the 'work' folder on the 'D' drive on my server. There seem to be extra slashes on the paths in the error message. I don't know if that's the issue or how it works. Sorry for the long message. If there is a better way to report bugs or trouble shoot this, please let me know. Thank you for the great work on this system!

[@mattburkey]

UPDATE: Flamenco 3.4 fixed the above issues. Thank you so much!!

[@remkm1715]

Does Blender need to be installed on the worker? or can it just be placed in a folder? does it need to be running to be found by the manager?

[@mrpinguin9189]

I have found out that you do need to install blender on the worker but not open

[@Robulite]

Do I need to keep the plugins the same between all my Blender workers?

Nope, the addon is only used when submitting a file to Flamenco. After that you don’t need it.

[@NTruske]

please which Linux OS distribution is preferred?

[@Bendoescamera]

Does Flamenco work with Aces?

[@DanielPartzsch]

Thanks. Is this also possible to set this up with a cloud drive instead? Meaning that all the computers are not in the same network but only the files sync via a desktop client like onedrive for example?

[@BenleGentil]

That'd be great! Also trying to understand how / if relative path could work in some way

That's not possible right now, because Flamenco wouldn't know when the files have actually synced. It assumes that as soon as files are written to disk, they are available at all the workers. Especially when you have tasks that take rendered files and process them further, it's important to get the timing right. With cloud syncs this'll be hard.

[@BenleGentil]

@ Can't it be something that's on the user side ? Flamenco would open the blend file and render it, if there's missing files or assets we'll get pink textures and missing models, I believe that's how it used to work for Autodesk Backburner. One element we'd need is relative path as that cloud drive is not always located in the same location.

@@BenleGentil There are many pitfalls, and each of them can be overcome I'm sure. I'd love to see this in Flamenco, but I myself have no time to work on this.

[@orphydiancg7759]

Can you guys make the UI more like Blender style?

[@unrulynut3960]

Does this mean I can render complex projects easier using this add-on

[@teerasaktk]

Can i use one worker and multiple GPU on ONE WOKER

One worker would simply run Blender once. If you can configure Blender to use multiple GPUs simultaneously, Flamenco should be able to do that too.

[@teerasaktk]

@ thank for reply 😊😊

[@teerasaktk]

@ I have some question I'm create flamenco_work.yaml in running folder and SET UP variable FLAMENCO_WORKER_NAME and FLAMENCO_HOME but worker still use default name and default path not read from yaml file

@@teerasaktk These are "environment variables", and not Flamenco variables. You need to set them via a platform-specific way.

[@legendhasit2568]

Hey everyone, what type of storage solution would you recommend for a team of 4 using Flamenco?

[@TheCreaperHead]

Sata SSD nas. with SSD storage getting really cheap now days, you can definitely build an SSD nas on the cheap for nice performance for network storage

[@emrebagloglu2552]

how use it from mac os

[@Ecceptor]

Does this work for AOV render passes?

Flamenco simply tells Blender to render. Configure it to output to multilayer EXR and it should Just Work

[@Ecceptor]

@ Any idea why on my laptop it cant find Ffmpeg?

[@Ecceptor]

@ Hmm. Worker pc needs to open flamenco manager to work. Don't know if that was intended

This isn't the right place to help you out. Pop over to Blender Chat (link in the description), there we can talk.

[@bongointernacional]

Cool !! very easy to put on other pc, you don't need to configure. Have you managed to change the output name? other than a folder with the date and sequence in #####. In a project with many layers and sequences it is not practical to have to rename and copy each time. Thank you

I've added an answer to your question to the FAQ on the Flamenco website 👍

[@jklmn9901]

Does this Flamenco means we can render much quicker

@@jklmn9901 yes, if you have multiple computers that can work together. Flamenco doesn’t magically make a single computer faster.

[@marcorusso9624]

Help please: i´m able to submite a job but the worker doesnt start with the next job he renders just the first chunk if the chunck size is 5 he renders the first 5 frames if its 1 jsut one frame but doesnt asign the next chunk to the worker, why?

[@marcorusso9624]

I got it wrong but its not like he doesnt aply the the next chunck he gives me an output for the frame (every thing looks right) but he doesent put the frame as completed butit is

[@MasekFilip]

Hey, I have maybe a stupid questions, but... Where do I select a name for the files? The job starts rendering as soon as I submit to flamenco, but I want to submit like 10 jobs and they start it. Is there a way to do this? I have to cancel the queue and then requeue but that seems to be confusing flamenco because then sometimes it starts to render stuff that I already deleted from the queue. Also, is there a way to put info like how much time the last frame took and maybe estimated time for the job? Thanks!

[@3Rton]

sike

[@muhammedbaykul3194]

Hi. What is Flamenco?

From the video description: Flamenco is the Free and Open Source render manager used at Blender Studio.

[@abubakaramjad3343]

Does This Decrease Your Render Time🤔🤔

It does, by allowing multiple computers to render an animation together. The more computers you throw at it, the faster it'll get. It doesn't help speed up the individual computers, though.

[@Saddestmatth]

perfect! Can we use mac and pc worker at the same time ?

[@sybren.blender]

Yup.

[@Kryptonian0024]

how to use this without network drive like render from pc to flamenco please reply

If you don't have a shared drive, you can run it all on one computer. Of course that doesn't make the rendering any faster, but it will make it easy to queue up renders and have them all done while you're having a nap.

[@Kryptonian0024]

@ thank you 🙏🏼 and how to setup the flamenco without shared drive any article or tut ?

@@Kryptonian0024 Exactly the same. Just don't point it at F:\Flamenco but at something like C:\Flamenco. Note that you really can't have more than one computer in your "farm" then, and you'll have to run Flamenco Manager & Worker on that one computer.

[@Kryptonian0024]

@ okay thank you sir for your reply 🙌🙏🏼

[@3dvfxprofessor]

It would be better to use a UNC path instead of a mapped network drive and Blender should be stored centralized on the server as a portable version so that all clients can load Blender by a shortcut from this location with the specific prefs on each client to get sure that all clients eg. use GPU rendering. Just replacing the Blender folder makes it very easy to update Blender for a bigger render farm. That's what we do with the free render manager called Afanasy (cgru).

[@chielsaro2501]

Wouldn't this cause issues when using different hardware? I'm thinking OpenCL vs CUDA vs HIP , ...

UNC: yes, in the longer term. For now, forward slashes without drive letters (every OS out there, except Windows) vs backslashes with drive letters (only Windows) is tricky enough. In Blender, a path like //NAS/flamenco/texture.png is actually a path relative to the current blend file, whereas \\NAS\flamenco\texture.png is UNC notation and on your NAS. In a situation where paths also may have to go to Linux machines, exchanging forward/backward slashes seems natural, but if it changes the meaning of a path, the whole path handling needs to be done very carefully. Blender on the shared storage: already possible, just point Flamenco to it.

[@3dvfxprofessor]

@@chielsaro2501 No. The prefs for the specific GPU will be saved in the user folder.

[@heisenbergww1957]

How long until a render online of a still image from a single user PC feature comes, Most Blender users have single workstation and poor video cards .

[@JackJohnson-y5u]

are you willing to pay for someone else to render your stuff? if not then good luck

[@BlenderStudio]

Flamenco 3.0 has just been released! Check the release announcement at studio.blender.org/blog/announcing-flamenco-3-release/

[@BelchamberUs]

...And just like that, Autodesk 3Ds Max and their Backburner Manager seem so less useful to me, thank you BlenderStudio as always!

[@davidguy207]

Sadly this doesn't work for me. For some reason if though i gave it the blender.exe path the worker says that it doesn't exist

[@MindfinderX]

As always, amazing stuff!

[@TreyCoursey]

Watch the demo on bcon...now watching this video...everything seems great...but I get an error no output path...but I've setup and configured the output path when starting up. The manager shows there is an output path...but blender will not fill in the field....it says for internal use only in red. I've ran as administrator, restarted blender, removed and added back the add-on. Something strange going on. 3.6.5 latest download of Flamenco just now. Anyone with help?

[@niyal]

That’s perfect. 🤟🏼

[@linktavo]

This is pure gold, thank you for all the hard work put on creating this super necessary tool in complex pipelines.

[@EradicateTheHumanRace]

Preach

[@arunsar7893]

So, Hadoop for rendering. Sounds good! :-)

[@YiChi457]

PNG is a bad choice for rendering. It's a WEB format not designed at all for animation and vfx. Show the good practices and use EXR.

"Designed for" and "used for" are two very different things. Also EXR is unusable when you want to produce a video, it's only good as an intermediate format. For a 5-minute tutorial, I've focused on an as-simple-as-possible setup.

[@_JonathanTait]

@ great tut, been looking for a farm for ages! Thank you!! will this work for TIFF exports or only if we sending out .png?

@@_JonathanTait Currently JPEG and PNG are the only supported image formats for previews in the web interface. TIFF support shouldn't be too hard to add, though.

[@_JonathanTait]

ok i have found the answer further down! Thanks for your hard work

I just implemented support for reading TIFF files. It'll be part of the upcoming Flamenco 3.1!

[@marcorusso6529]

flamenco manager got the job, render the chunks he had to generate the output and stops, he doesent start with the next chunks, any Idea?

[@sybren.blender]

flamenco.blender.org/faq/#render-jobs-hang-after-the-first-chunk-of-frames-whats-wrong

[@josedeju]

i test on single machine and i use Network drive (Z:) and put all (shared folder, blends, etc) on that drive and Flamenco give me errors: Error performing OR one path is relative and the other is absolute. can't acces the .blend. idk :(

[@jnggraphics]

same here did you manage to make it work?

[@josedeju]

No ! and i go back to use Autodesk backburner on Blender, works great @@jnggraphics

[@jairoismaelurregobejarano7057]

Flamenco its free?

From the video description: Flamenco is the Free and Open Source render manager used at Blender Studio. So yes, 100% free, just like Blender itself!