Speed Up Your Blender Renders with Free Google Colab

so you have a Noto fast PC and you want to speed up your render time well all you need is a Google account since there are over 1.8 billion active Google accounts in the world I bet you already have one so in this video I use Google colab to render blender animations for free actually a little while ago I made a video on this it worked at the time but now a lot of people facing a few errors and there have been a slight changes in the process so I decided to create this video showing you the current process to get your render done to render using collab first we need to prepare our blender project to have no errors or missing files here I have a simple scene I prepared for this test render with a few simple measures with textures on them an IM material and a glass material and also a simple Trail asset from my engine FX pack which uses the new simulation notes and it's a 25 frames long animation this means we need to make sure that we pack these textures to the blend file and bake the simulation so it will render correctly first I select my simulation notes asset and hit bake this will create a cache data folder next to our blend file this is the same thing you need to do if you have a clo simulation Flo simulation or something like like that in your scene you need to bake them before you upload the project to render then you need to make sure you pack the textures hdri images fonts and any other external assets you have in the scene into your blend file for that go to file external data and pack resources all of my Textures in the scene are already packed so it says no new files have been packed but users will say something like six new files back that's usually what you have to do if you have a simple scene like this but let's say your scene is huge and this packing file will result in a few hundred megabyte size blend file well you can still upload that and continue to The Next Step but if you make a mistake in your blend file this means you have to keep uploading that big blend file over and over again so in most cases I recommend separating in the packed files and the blend file if you have a big project so to do that go to file external data unpack resources and choose the second option to write files to the current directory this will create a new folder next to the blend file containing all your external textures without losing their connection with the blend file here it reduces the blend file size slightly but in a big project this could be a few hundred megabytes now before you finish setting this up make sure you are rendering on Cycles make sure you have all your render settings the way you want and here in the output part I just type two slashes we can change the output file format later so I won't worry about that now now go to your Google drive here I have created a new folder to store all the files inside that I'll create another folder and upload our blend file textur folder and bake data folder go one step back and create another folder to store our blender set up for future use also I create another folder here to store our final renders you don't actually need to create these many folders but I just like to keep things organized then go to collab it's cab. research. google.com you will be welcome with this screen they change this layout once in a while but all you have to do is find the upload section then upload this notebook file I provided in the description it contains a notebook template for you to get started don't get scared seeing all these calls we just have to do a bunch of copying and pasting now go to edit notebook settings and make sure you are connected to a GPU session our first step is to download the correct version of blender for that go to this link and find the exact version of blender you need here in this project you can see I am using blender 3.6.2 so that's the version I need to find I click on 3.6 and find the 3.6.2 version and here be very careful doesn't matter whether you are on a Windows PC or a Mac to use collab you will need the Linux version of blender most of you do this step correctly the first time around but forget it when you want to download a different version so copy the link of the 3.6.2 Linux version come back to collab and paste it here here you won't see any changes because this notebook already had that exact version now click on this run button cab will start a new GPU session and then start downloading the blender setup this is not something that depends on your internet speed so it will take some time but don't forget you don't need to do this every single time I'll show you a method to skip this later so it took about 4 minutes to download let's move on to the next cell oh by the way these are called cells now we need to make a connection between our Google Drive and collab for that run the second cell this will ask you to provide permission for collab to access Google Drive allowing with you might also get an email saying you provided permission to collab now if you click on this folder icon you will see the collab storage here we have the downloaded blender setup and here we have the linked Google Drive inside it you will find the files we uploaded now SK skip the next two cells and go to this install blender cell here make sure the blender setup next name is exactly what you downloaded for that you can just copy that name from here and paste it then run the cell now if you go back to collab storage you will see we have another folder containing our installed blender files the next step is to open blender and render our project but to make things a bit easier here I first tell collab where is our blend file for this go inside your drive find that blend file we uploaded and click on these three dots to copy the file path then paste it here inside these commas run the cell this will assign that bend file to this file name variable now to the final step rendering the animation first we need to run our blender application find our installed blender application this one copy it part paste it here and make sure to remove this content part this should be just exclamation mark Dot and blender application location after that we have a few command line arguments this B tells collab to run this application in the background if you want to know more about this command line arguments and modify these cells you can check this page in the blender manual here we are referencing our blender project we assign it to file name earlier we have no audio in the scene e stands for render engine in this case Cycles then o means output part for that I find the renders folder I created copy it part and paste it here here in the last part I put a slash and type what I want the output file to name I call it test trendercore S stand for start frame and E stand for frame I set that to 25 a means animation we are rendering an animation if you want to render a single frame you can use this code but I don't really see a collab as a useful tool to render just one frame then this f means output file format here I set it to PNG if you want a different format prer to the manual to see exactly how to PR that format I want to render on Cuda so I put it here if you won't you can put Optics here to access those cards here collab notify me that I am not utilizing the GPU that's fine I am just about use it now click run to start rendering if you did all the steps correctly it will start rendering once the first frame is done rendering give it a bit of time and go see your Google drive to see the rendered results and here we have the first frame no missing textures if you don't see a rendered output stop the collab cell and make sure your path is correct if you see a default Cube render make sure you set the path for your blend file correctly in both cells as you can see it took a few minutes to render mainly because of that simulation node asset they usually consume a lot of render time anyway here we have all the rendered images you can select them and download so let's say you coming back to render another project after a few days and you don't want to spend another four five minutes downloading blender setup to the collab well what you can do is store this downloaded setup now in your Google Drive and access that setup next time around that is far easier than downloading the setup again so I will copy this downloaded blender setup to the blender versions folder I created earlier first copy and paste the blender path of the current blender setup here and then copy and paste the part of the Google drive folder here make sure to put the setup name after that then frun that cell and you can see we copied that setup within 2 3 seconds now let's see how you can import it back to collab for next time use first I delete this file so you can see it clearly when imported to import it back to collab simply flip these two parts here then run the cell and you can see it quickly copied the setup back to color this mean you can save quite a few minutes next time when using the same blender version all you have to do is Mount the Google Drive copy the setup to color install it reference the blend file and render the animation once you finish rendering everything and done with collab go to here and terminate the session you can use this option as well and that's how you use Google colab to render your blender animations but before I go let me tell you a few more things about collab for the free users you only get a few hours per day to use gpus and you have to have the browser open this is not by any means a crazy fast rendering option if you have a PC with low performance you will enjoy the speed of the collab also since it renders on the cloud you will have all your PC left to work on something else which I think is the best Advantage you will get from using collab but if you're looking for a much easier Cloud rendering Farm option you can use cheap it render Farm it is free and it has its own pros and cons if you're looking for an even better option I think you need to look into a paid Cloud printer in service I can personally recommend Fox trender Farm I have used it and just they have sponsored a few videos on this channel but not this one this is just my personal opinion anyway I hope you learn something useful if so hit the like button share this video and don't forget to subscribe to HX learn so you won't miss out in the next video drops

Channel: Motion Dreams

Views: 17,858

Keywords: Speed up Blender Renders, google colab, Cycles render faster, rendering faster with google Colab, Blender google colab tutorial, how to use Google Colab to Render Blender Animation, Blender fast Rendering, Free Cloud Rendering services, Google Colab Rendering, Sheepit, renderfarm, cloud computing, How to render fast in Blender, Blender Cycles, Speed up render, reduce render time in Blender, increase rendering speed, Blender render fast, Render animations, Free, Blender rendering

Id: cGcVKHpbKQo

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2023