Blender-2.8: pip is already. On Debian, using the Debian-packaged version of Blender, as far as I can tell, a system python executable is used. For 2.78, I was.
Also I assume you already setup Blender 2.80 on the instance, and checked that it worked. I myself solved the problem on EC2 p2 instance, Ubuntu 18.04 with Deep Learning Base AMI. Please send me an email if you have more questions, want to correct me or give me feedback (It is my first post so I will appreciate feedback). No version of blender works for me, and running with softwaregl is the recommended fix, but I can't do that. Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) edited projects, added BF Blender; removed BF Blender: 2.8. The much anticipated update of the Blender 2.80 milestone is here! With over a thousand fixes and several important updates that were planned for the 2.8 series. Most notable are the sculpting tools overhaul, support for NVIDIA RTX ray tracing in Cycles, Intel Open Image denoising, a better outliner, a new file browser and much more.
Barely a day goes past without a new addon being released. It's awesome, but it's hard to keep up. So I've searched the community to find 12 of the best addons available today.
Last year we shared this list of free addons, but a year has passed and the Blender Market is booming. So in this post we'll look at both the best free and paid addons available..
1. Asset Flinger
What it does: Allows you to quickly and easily import your objects into other scenes.
Probably one of the coolest free addons that speeds your workflow. It works by adding a new toolshelf in Blender which lets you access your assets and easily import them to your scene just with a click. It's still a work in progress, and has a lot of features to be added in the future, but it's pretty awesome as-is!
- Price: Free!
- Author: Manu Jarvinen
2. RetopoFlow
What it does: Makes retopologizing a mesh, much, much faster and easier.
Probably the highest quality paid addon around. Created and supported by CGCookie, this addon is made for professionals.
This addon exists because when you sculpt something, you're not thinking about structure of your mesh. So the resulting mesh is ugly. But in order to apply textures, animate it or just make a clean render, you need to convert it into a cleaner mesh. Normally this involves a painful click-by-click method, but this addon makes it much, much easier. It's a toolset designed just for retopologizing something, and it's awesome at it.
- Price: $71.25
- Author: CG Cookie
3. The Grove
What it does: Generates beautiful trees.
This works much like the Sapling Addon that comes with Blender, however, it has more improved features and a simplified interface for easier growing of trees. It's still constrained to Blender's operators which means you can't move, scale or rotate the tree until after you've finished editing all the parameters (kind of annoying). But it does as advertised, and makes great trees. It's the best tool for making trees in Blender, than anything else currently available.
- Price: $119.80
- Author: Wybren van Keulen
4. EasyFX
What it does: Allows you to add compositing effects to your renders very quickly
If you're sick and tired of making complicated node setups just to do basic things in the compositor (like add a vignette) then this addon is for you. It gives you a plethora of the most-commonly used effects and adjustments right inside the Image Editor. The very nifty UI exposes the internal parameters that would be rather tedious to work with if you fiddled with it yourself.
- Price: Free!
- Author: Nils Söderman
5. Mirage
Allows you to: Easily create complex terrains
This is the ANT Landscape addon on steroids! If you're an environment artist tasked with making a largescale landscape, this will save you hours. It shines in it's easy-to-understand interface with helpful tools like showing you the vertex count of a terrain you're about to make before hitting that 'Generate' button.
- Price: $25
- Author: Diego Gangl
6. Matalogue
What it does: Gives you quick access to all the materials and lights in your scene.
Making complex scenes, means dealing with large amounts of materials, lights and compositing setups. This tool by Greg Zaal alleviates all these frustrations for you by giving you access to all this in one tab in the Node Editor.
- Price: Free!
- Author: Greg Zaal
7. Asset Sketcher
Allows you to: Quickly distribute your objects by 'painting' them into your scene
Placing assets/objects manually in your scene can get pretty tiresome. But thankfully, this addon makes the job easier and more artist-friendly by utilizing a painting stroke approach to placing objects. It's as simple as clicking and dragging on your 'canvas,' (plus more tools). Awesome!
- Price: $29.95
- Author: Andreas Esau, Matthias Esau
8. Animation Nodes
Allows you to: Animate almost anything in Blender!
This addon brings parametric modeling and animation to life! I've been wanting a feature much like Houdini where you can input node values and have them drive object properties. By default, this is possible through Blender via constraints and python coding--but this addon makes it intuitive and easy to use. It makes it easy to do mechanical rigs, motion design, and programming. It opens up a whole array of possibilities!
- Price: $0
- Author: Jacques Lucke
9. BakeTool
Hassle-free baking of textures for your scene
Remember the baking tutorial we did a few years ago? This addon makes the process and workflow easier, and much more manageable. It basically bakes all the shading and light information on your objects so you don't have to keep re-rendering all the frames of your animation. It works best in ArchiViz and games, and works for both Cycles and the Blender Internal renderer. So cool!
- Price: $14.95
- Author: Cogumelo Softworks
10. BLAM Blender Camera Calibration Toolkit
Easily match the angle and perspective of a reference photo
This addon makes combining a render with a photograph a piece of cake. Using some clever programming, it accurately guesses the focal length and angle that the photo was taken with, so you can effortlessly put a render over the top :) We mentioned it one of our recent tutorials.
- Price: Free!
- Author: Per Gantelius
11. IK-Text Effects
Add special effects to any text in Blender
If you've ever envied the effortlessly results from tools like Adobe After Effects, this addon is for you. It's a powerful toolset for animating text in Blender. Roblox price pc.
- Price: $14.99
- Author: IK3D
12. Gaffer - Light Manager
Take full control of all the lights in your scene
Blender 2 8 Deb Lane
This addon makes your lighting workflow a whole lot easier! Lighting in Blender can be fun, but it can also be frustrating when you have too many lights to manually adjust, and begin to lose track of which does what. Using this addon will alleviate those problems. It gives you control over your scene's lighting setup from a single panel, tweaking settings without needing to find and select each light one by one. A must have for big scenes!
- Price: $17.95
- Author: Greg Zaal
Allows you to: Quickly and easily add realistic outdoor lighting to your scenes
Disclaimer: We made this, so we're biased.
Outdoor lighting is more complex than just a sun lamp, so we created this addon to give you real world lighting inside Blender. It works by using real skies that were captured in HDR, and feeds it in Blender, providing both accurate lighting and reflections across the entire scene.
It comes with 80 HDR skies, that you can cycle through effortlessly:
You can even try the demo before you buy. I used it myself in this scene.
- Price: $97 - $197
- Author: Blender Guru
- Buy it: http://www.blenderguru.com/product/pro-lighting-skies/
- How to Use it: http://www.blenderguru.com/install-pro-lighting-skies/
Do you have your favorite addons that aren't on the list? Post in the comments below!
Update: **** The detailed answer to this problem is answered in this post
Please apply this since it is much easier. ****
You can still use this post to get Blender GUI working in servers, but since it does not involve TurboVNC it is slow. I will update this post in few weeks and change it to using Blender GUI on Servers using TurboVNC+VirtualGL.
Old post:
Hello Blender people! In this post I am going to explain how to use EEVEE Rendering introduced in Blender 2.80 on AWS. I searched a lot for this, and couldn't find any, so decided to write this solution after I found one. Actually this solution is not specific for Blender, any program that wants to utilize a GPU on a remote machine can benefit from this. I created this guide for people who know how to use basics of remote connection such as using ssh to connect to a EC2 instance. Also I assume you already setup Blender 2.80 on the instance, and checked that it worked. I myself solved the problem on EC2 p2 instance, Ubuntu 18.04 with Deep Learning Base AMI. Please send me an email if you have more questions, want to correct me or give me feedback (It is my first post so I will appreciate feedback).
Problem: EEVEE rendering is super fast and great, but it does not support headless rendering, which means it needs a display to render. Unfortunately there are no displays in most clusters. This can be solved by ssh -X forwarding, (or using it with xvfb, vnc) but then, you are not utilizing the remote servers GPUs, because your X Window Manager (X11) communicates with your PC's kernel, which controls your own hardware. The problem is X server is not designed for 3D rendering. Software engineers have realized the slowdown of X server when loaded with 3D jobs (which is called Indirect Rendering), which resulted creation of libraries such as OpenGL that directly communicates with the kernel. (Direct Rendering). The worse thing is when you ssh -X directly, you cannot even do direct rendering, and you get even worse performance than solely working on your own PC's GPU, and you ask to yourself, 'what?'.
Note: I wasn't able to solve this problem for a long time, because I didn't understand how X11 works, so I strongly recommend you to spend couple hours or even days to learn how general communication works. It is such a relief.
Solution: Fortunately some great people solved this problem by creating the software,Virtual GL. (https://virtualgl.org/) They have a really good documentation, and most of you probably can read their documentation to setup their system. The system we are using in this guide is called 'The VGL Transport' under In-Depth-Background section of their website.
Steps for Virtual GL setup:
1) Check that your Operating System is supported by going Documentation tab under VGL website. AWS Ubuntu images come without a display manager. Install either GDM or LightDM. I downloaded LightDM, because it is lighter, by apt-get install lightdm.
2) Create new user by on the image by following this page.
You have to setup yourself as admin. Ubuntu AMI comes with only 'ubuntu' user, but it does not have a password which creates problems. Personally I like to work in a terminal with colors and tab-completion, (when you su to another user, ubuntu preferences disappear) so what I did was to create a new account, then setup a new password for the ubuntu account while being a super user in the new account. 😀
3)Create the xorg.conf file by these steps.
Blender 2 8 Debug
Leave out –use-display-device=None, as instructed. This should work fine if you have well setup nVidia libraries. If not, you should fix those first.
4) Download the latest Virtual GL files from this link.
You should download this file to both server (cluster, aws) and client (your pc). I downloaded to my PC and scp to server. I downloaded version 2.6.3, with file name virtualgl_2.6.3_amd64.deb, since my system is 64-bit. Please check the version accordingly.
5) Now we are going to setup VGL on server. (Chapters 4-5 on documentation) I will be writing the setup codes that applies to Ubuntu only, but documentation is very good, so for other OS you can go over their documentation. First we cd to the virtualgl folder and install it by:
Then on server side (do not do this on your PC!) we stop the display manager by:
To be sure, you can use 'service –status-all' to check working services. (+/- for running/not running)
Configure VGL:
Select option 1 (Configure server for use with VirtualGL in GLX mode.)
Then there will be 3 questions of Y/n for group/individual usage, which I answered as n. You can check documentation if interested in Y options. 3d animation free.
Blizzard starcraft 2. Now restarting the display manager
At this point we can check if the configuration is success. Please be sure output of the command below does not contain any errors. If you have answered 'no' to all three previous questions check by:
6) Client side of VGL Transport does not require a configuration. Just install the software by 'dpkg -i virtualgl*.deb'. Then connect to the ec2 instance by
This will ask you the password of ubuntu twice. If you have not created the password for ubuntu, change the {user} to your other username. Note that once you open the client, it stays open. You can check if the client is running by the command vglclient. After you exited from the instance, the client will work even if you connect to the instance by ssh -X.
Virtual GL works by prepending the command 'vglrun' to every program. For example, check the cluster's GPU and library versions, or run glxgears:
Blender can be used similarly.
The upper command will open blender screen, with ip address showing on the top bar. For my case, I could interact with the blender, such as go to settings and check if the GPU's are selected for cycles. (Of course this can be done by bpy as well)
I find Virtual GL very elegant and also very powerful. If you liked this article please consider donating to them, because they did a really good job. Please let me know if you have any comments, and happy rendering.
