AWS Deadline Cloud for Blender

User guide | Service documentation | Deadline Cloud on GitHub

AWS Deadline Cloud for Blender is a python package that allows users to create AWS Deadline Cloud jobs from within Blender. Using the Open Job Description (OpenJD) Adaptor Runtime this package also provides a command line application that adapts Blender's command line interface to support the OpenJD specification.

Compatibility

This library requires:

1. Blender 3.6 - 5.2,
2. Python 3.9 to 3.13; and
3. Linux, Windows, or a macOS operating system.
   • Adaptor only supports Linux and macOS

Submitter

This package provides a Blender plugin that creates jobs for AWS Deadline Cloud using the AWS Deadline Cloud client library. Based on the loaded scene it determines the files required, allows the user to specify render options, and builds an OpenJD template that defines the workflow.

Getting Started

If you have installed the submitter using the Deadline Cloud submitter installer you can follow the guide to Setup Deadline Cloud submitters for the manual steps needed after installation.

If you are setting up the submitter for a developer workflow or manual installation you can follow the instructions in the DEVELOPMENT file.

Experimental: Install and auto-update Blender add-on

The Blender submitter can be installed and updated within Blender. Requires Blender 4.2 or newer. This add-on and install method are still experimental and may be removed in the future. Use at your own risk.

1. Open Blender. Click the Edit menu then click Preferences.... In the Preferences window, click on Get Extensions on the left side bar. In the top right of the Preferences window, click Repositories, click the + icon, then click Add Remote Repository.

2. Set the URL to https://github.com/aws-deadline/deadline-cloud-for-blender/releases/latest/download/index.json and check the box for Check for Updates on Startup. Click Create.

   

3. Now, under the Available list, there should be an entry for AWS Deadline Cloud. Click its Install button. A progress bar will track the download then disappear when the installation is complete.

   

4. The add-on is now installed! You can now use the new Submit to AWS Deadline Cloud option in the Render menu. If later there's an update available, an Update button will appear next to the AWS Deadline Cloud entry in the Get Extensions section.

Submission Hooks

The Blender submitter supports Deadline Cloud submission hooks — studio-provided scripts that run at the pre-GUI, pre-submission, and post-submission phases (for example to pre-populate the submitter dialog or enforce studio defaults). The submitter, and any pre-GUI hook, opens from Render > Submit to AWS Deadline Cloud.

Blender has no on-disk job bundle at submission time, so hooks are sourced from the directory named by the DEADLINE_HOOKS_DIR environment variable (set it before launching Blender). Enable environment hooks with:

deadline config set settings.allow_environment_hooks true

For the rest — the hooks.yaml format, the per-phase input/output contracts, examples, and security considerations — see the AWS Deadline Cloud client docs: Submission Hooks.

Adaptor

The Blender Adaptor implements the OpenJD interface that allows render workloads to launch Blender and feed it commands. This gives the following benefits:

• a standardized render application interface,
• sticky rendering, where the application stays open between tasks,

Jobs created by the submitter use this adaptor by default, and require that both the installed adaptor and the Blender executable be available on the PATH of the user that will be running your jobs.

Or you can set the BLENDER_EXECUTABLE to point to the Blender executable.

Getting Started

The adaptor can be installed by the standard python packaging mechanisms:

$ pip install deadline-cloud-for-blender

After installation it can then be used as a command line tool:

$ blender-openjd --help

For more information on the commands the OpenJD adaptor runtime provides, see here.

Versioning

This package's version follows Semantic Versioning 2.0, but is still considered to be in its initial development, thus backwards incompatible versions are denoted by minor version bumps. To help illustrate how versions will increment during this initial development stage, they are described below:

1. The MAJOR version is currently 0, indicating initial development.
2. The MINOR version is currently incremented when backwards incompatible changes are introduced to the public API.
3. The PATCH version is currently incremented when bug fixes or backwards compatible changes are introduced to the public API.

Security

See CONTRIBUTING for more information.

Telemetry

See telemetry for more information.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.