Announcing Flamenco 3 Beta

Flamenco 3 has just entered Beta stage! The render management software used by Blender Studio is now considered to be featured and stable enough that anyone can test it out.

Grab your copy at flamenco.blender.org and give it a try!

The Journey

All of the design decisions outlined a few months ago by Sybren have been followed and implemented.

Flamenco has been re-written from scratch to better support its core design principles:

• Simplicity: Flamenco should be up and running in as few steps as possible. It should work "offline", and not depend on any online service.
• Transparency: It should be possible to quickly find out the state of the job queue, workers, tasks, down to the output of each render command.
• Interactivity: The user interface should be fast and always interactive, delivering a smooth user experience.
• Robustness: Flamenco should be stable and predictable in its behavior, handle errors gracefully and clearly.

In this video you can see how quickly you can get up and running with Flamenco:

Flamenco is currently being used in the production of Blender Studio's Project Heist. Once Flamenco is tested enough to be considered stable, an official v3 release will be announced here.

Get Involved

The project is free and open source just like Blender, and welcomes contributions, especially when they are aligned with the roadmap.

If you are interested in exploring the codebase and building Flamenco yourself, check out the developer documentation at flamenco.blender.org.

Credits

This is an amazing milestone and the culmination of several months of work, tirelessly led by dr. Sybren, with contributions on UI/UX design and development from Pablo Vazquez. Special thanks go to Blender Studio for testing and feedback, and to the community at #flamenco on Blender Chat.

A Personal Note

As the original author of Flamenco, it's been incredibly inspiring to see how far it has come in the past 10 years. While not a single line of code remains from its original implementation, its mission to enable artists and creators to easily setup and use a fully open source rendering pipeline is still there, stronger than ever.