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Pulverize

A multi-process rendering script for Blender VSE.

What is it for?

Pulverize is a script for rendering video from Blender using multiple processes.

Why is it useful?

If you have, say, an 8 core processor (like me), Blender's Video Sequence Editor will only use 1 of those when rendering. This is a huge waste of computing power, and makes render times intolerably slow. This script will render the video in parts, using one process for each part. This means renders are 8 times faster with a machine like mine. You get all the benefits of multithreaded rendering in Blender without Blender VSE actually being multithreaded.

What are the dependencies?

You will need:

  • Blender (duh)
    • For best results: Output as an MPEG, and encode with MPEG-4 under Format, and H.264 under Codec.
  • FFMPEG (for putting all the video parts together)
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Linux, MacOS, or Windows 10

How do I use it?

Download this repository, and extract it to your computer somewhere. You can make a link to it to run it easily like this:

sudo ln -s path/to/pulverize.php /usr/bin/pulverize

Usage:

pulverize.php <blender_project_file> [<number_of_processes>] [<options>]

Example:

pulverize.php project.blend 6 '{\"keepTempFiles\":true,\"displayStdErr\":true}'

Options are given in JSON format as an object. (They should be flags, but that's a TODO for another time.)

  • keepTempFiles defaults to false. When true, the frame range renders and the FFMPEG input script won't be deleted.
  • displayStdErr defaults to false. When true, StdErr stream from the blender processes will be displayed along with the Pulverize progress indicator. FFMPEG will also show warnings, not just errors.

There's now a Python version, pulverize.py, available for use (Thanks, jpwarren!):

Some differences from pulverize.php:

It uses argparse to make it easy to add new commandline arguments

-w or --workers option to specify how many processes you want to use for rendering. Default value is the same as pulverize.php.
--dry-run option to test things without actually rendering or concatenating
--render-only option to just do the render of tempfiles, but not the concat
--concat-only option to concat, but skip the render stage

It doesn't show progress of the rendering subprocesses, so if you want that, best to use pulverize.php instead.

Why is it PHP?

Cause PHP is a badass scripting language. Also, I don't know Python.

Why is the code so unconventional (read messy)?

Cause I wrote this for me. This is how I code when no one's watching, and judging me for that would be wrong. ;)