Attract and Flamenco public beta

After over a year of use in production at Blender Institute and an initial private beta testing phase, Flamenco and Attract are officially in public beta! This means they are available for free for every Blender Cloud subscriber.

Attract: production tracking

Attract is the production tracking software we used while working on Agent 327: Operation Barbershop and Cosmos Laundromat. It currently offers task management, with multiple user assignments, due dates, activity log and comments. Tasks can be managed with asset and shot lists.

Thanks to a tight integration with the Blender Cloud add-on, it is possible to populate and manage a shot list directly from the Blender Video Sequence Editor.

Learn more about Attract on cloud.blender.org/attract and check out this step-by-step demo on how to set up Attract for your personal project!

Flamenco: render management

Flamenco is our render managements software, and much more. We have been using it since Cosmos Laundromat to render animations, OpenGL previews, simulations and so on.

Currently, Blender Cloud does not provide rendering and computing services. The Flamenco server, available on the cloud, will manage render jobs and distribute them to your computing infrastructure.

One of the core features of Flamenco is the support for multiple render managers, which allows to have separated pools of workers. For example, you can run a small render farm in your studio, and a large on-demand farm on a computing cloud of your choice.

Currently Flamenco supports Blender rendering with any render engine configured, and it also supports progressive render with Cycles. Progressive renders allow for individual frames to be rendered across multiple workers with a complementary sample count, and then merged to obtain the final sample count. This process has several benefits, such as greatly speed up renders when working with a large render farm or getting early previews of a render job before reaching the final sample count.

Learn more about Flamenco on cloud.blender.org/flamenco and on the official website and docs on flamenco.io.

Organizations

If you work with a team and are interested in using Flamenco and Attract, every team member should have an active Blender Cloud subscription. This is not always ideal, and we are working to introduce Organizations in order to better handle access to Blender Cloud both for business and education.

Free Software

All software is released as GPL2 and it's available on developer.blender.org. We have an extensive roadmap of features planned for both Attract and Flamenco, but we look forward to hear from you what could be improved or added.