Documentation

Best Practices

Do a rendering test

Important: Before rendering a complete project on the RANCH, be sure to run a test rendering.

Run a low-resolution rendering of 6 to 10 significant frames of your project on the farm.

This will help you check that:

  • All your assets, caches, render parameters are generating the expected results on the Farm.
  • The rendering time and price of your project fits within the cost estimator.

Check your .vub archive

To be sure your assets and cache files are loaded correctly and packed accordingly in the .vub archive.

1 – Use the last version of the Blender RANCHecker

Check that the lastest version of the Blender RANCHecker is installed.

2 – No special characters

Avoid all the specials characters and spaces in your the folders and files names. Only use alphanumerical sign [A..Z][a..z][0..9] and “-” or “_”.

Example:
ELETRO3D Projet/Cuisine & éléctroménager/76XDR.blend – should be written – ELETRO3D_Projet/Cuisine_and_electromenager/76XDR.blend
In French “Cuisine & éléctroménager” means “Kitchen & household electrical appliances”

3 – Use the Blender functionality : Pack all into .blend

Before RANCHecking your scene:
Use – Blender → File → External data → Pack all into .blend (or Automatically pack all into .blend)
Then Save your scene. This allow to embed all your textures into your .blend file

To prepare your project

  1. If needed, import referenced or linked scenes into your main scene,
    (This may highly increased the .blend size : please save it under a new name)
    • Select all
    • Objects → Relations → Make Local → All
  2. Use the function:
    • File → External data → pack Ressources
    • File → External data → pack linked libraries
  3. Save your scene
  4. Select the directory where your archive will be generated with the Destination option, then click on the “Create Archive” button. It will check your scene and create a .vub archive with all the required files for the rendering.
  5. Finally, you can upload this project (the .vub archive) on the RANCH farm, to run the rendering.