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.
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49 comments
Is there a way to add shots not using the add-on in Blender? It seems weird that'd you'd have to already have a complete edit of your project before being able to create shots in Attract.
@mack_dadd2: Agreed I would also like to know, my thought was more if you are editing in another kind of software and want to just keep the project team organized using Attract. so far just using the Tasks tab to test things out,
@mack_dadd2: Adding shots directly from the Attract web interface will be possible very soon!
@Sean Kennedy PLUS 1 this bigtime
Really cool ! Thanks for releasing Attract, I'm testing it right now, moving from my old stylesheet, it's very pleasing to use. Like Forgotten Fantasies, I can't delete a task. Also, on one shot, when I add a task it's duplicated. Is there a place where I could do a proper bug report with screenshots and more details ?
Thanks a lot !
@henri.hebeisen: Bugs can be reported in the Flamenco project in Phabricator.
@sybren: Don't bother reporting the task deletion issue, just fixed that ;-)
@sybren: Great, thanks a lot :)
So far I am impressed with Attract.
The main problem I have with it, is for the Tasks tab, it would be great if you could add a filter, So you are able to filter by who as task is assigned to and the types of task, Because if you have a few hundred tasks on the list and no way to see which were assigned to you it gets a little confusing, and even just a filter to view all the unassigned tasks to request something be assigned to you.
Also a way to filter out all the completed tasks and specific types of tasks (choosing to only see the modeling or animation tasks)
These types of Filters would be useful for the Assets tab too.
@denzylfreelance: Also when a task is assigned to a person do they get a notification ?
@denzylfreelance: Currently not, but it will be supported! Added a note on developer.blender.org. Thanks for the feedback.
@fsiddi: Fantastic!
Looking forward to Organization. I would love to use Attract and Flamingo, but can't until Organization is complete. Thanks.
@Thomas Cheng: we are beta-testing organisations right now. Send an email to cloudsupport@blender.org if you want to join.
@Dr. Sybren: Thanks will send now.
Does every artist using Attract have to be a cloud member, or only the person who set it up?
@mack_dadd2: It looks every artist have to be a cloud member, and they are introducing Organizations subscription as written above
@mack_dadd2: ps have you tried https://www.crowdrender.com.au/ ?
@mack_dadd2: Currently yes, although we are working on Organizations, which will allow a single user to give access to an entire team!
@fsiddi: Ah, great! I typed my question before reading all the way to the bottom. Thanks!
How can we include Alembic cache files and those files that you said they were not included for the render with Flamenco?
Cheers and thanks!
@juangea: Preventing the inclusion of Alembic cache files must be done with the file extension filter, which we have set to "*.abc". You can turn this off, and the Alembic caches will be handled like any other dependency (i.e. always copied to the job storage directory). Alternatively you can use absolute paths to your common storage and use that both on your workstations and your render nodes (this is what we did).
Just checking Attract! I have already 2 questions: 1- Is there a way to delete shots? I made a mistake at first try and I had to delete the project and restart. 2- Can you assign an asset to the shot where it appears? It looks like you cannot, so what did you do for Agent 327? Did you have an additional breakdown for where the props appear?
Also, I've tried to delete a task and this message appears: Unable to delete task, code 403
Thanks for releasing this beta! :D
@Forgotten.Fantasies: 1- yes, from the sequence editor in Blender. 2- you could write it in the asset description, but there is no formal field for tracking that information.
About the task deletion: can you give me the URL of the task?
@sybren: Thanks for the response, Doctor ;)
Actually I cannot delete any task. Here's one for instance: https://cloud.blender.org/attract/p-59662bb68119170e3a6fd3f9/shots/with-task/596635118119170e16a66d61
Not sure if this is the URL.
@Forgotten.Fantasies: Fixed!
@sybren: Thanks!!!
Any plans for a client/guest view mode? Comment and/or only view for non-cloud subscribers would be useful. I'm thinking about a client, for example. Something that would work a little bit like the screenshots. A "public" (no need for register) with unique url just for viewing and a mandatory register blender account (but no need to be cloud subscriber) to add comments.
@nafergo: Yes we definitely have plans for centralised access management. This will happen via Organisations. Stay tuned :)
Hi, Is there a detailed tutorial explaining how to setup flamenco rendering on windows? I'm trying to do it be reading docoments here and there, Installed pip.. Installed the worker WHL.. got to the point where you need to setup a worker CFG.. I don't know how to get the Flamenco manager url, in the Flamenco cloud interface it says: url None yet, will be set by the Manager Don't know how to run the worker CFG.. Some help much needed.. Thanks!
@odederell: You need to install & configure a Manager first. The URL is simply the hostname or IP address of the machine that runs the Manager, with
http://orhttps://prepended to it (depending on whether you configured TLS certificates on your Manager). The installation documentation isn't that extensive yet, so if you're missing steps, send us an email at cloudsupport@blender.org.@sybren: Thanks for the explanation, I'll do that!
How can I add people to a project? I don't see list of people to choose from. Do I have to "friend" them first?
@boonsak: Go to "Edit Project" and then "Sharing". You can then choose who to share your project with.
@sybren: I did that, but I see no list of people coming up. Should I be connected with someone in the cloud network to be able to see their names? or can I use the email to invite them in?
@boonsak: It was a bug, fixed it! You should be able to share your projects now.
I'm having issues getting Flamenco running on my systems, who would I contact to get assistance? I've emailed both cloudsupport@blender.com and francesco@blender.org, with no response to now.
@mhankbud: cloudsupport@blender.org (NOT .com) is the right email address. Do be patient, though -- it's only Francesco and me who are available to help you out, and we're in Europe/Amsterdam time zone. I've already mailed you back.
I'm experiencing an issue, not sure if it's an Attract or Blender Cloud addon problem. After deleting a project through Blender Cloud -it was setup for Attract- the project still appears in Blender Cloud addon and the next projects that I've created don't appear at all.
@Forgotten.Fantasies: Ok, everything is working now. Is there a delay when you delete projects or something?
@Forgotten.Fantasies: There is the refresh button next to the projects. If you hit that, Blender should see the changes in projects.
@sybren: You mean in the Cloud addon? It shoud but it didn't did until this morning :( Yesterday I tried to log out and log in and even restoring Blender to default and then activate the addons, logging, seek for projects... The same result, the deleted project appeared and the new ones didn't. Might the problem be that the deleted project and the new one were named the same?
@Forgotten.Fantasies: Please send an email to cloudsupport@blender.org to work on this further -- these comments aren't meant for more than a quick question-answer thing.
There is no way to delete the Assets in the assets tab in Attract ?
@Denzyl Basterfield: indeed, at the moment there is not.
Any news regarding the Organizations?
@Nelson Gonçalves We are still evaluating on how to offer this. There will be some communication about it in a few week.
This looks really awesome -- I however do mostly stills, and would like to know how to create my shots either from blender or (ideally) manually outside of blender integration (or both) -- I can add tasks and assets, would like to be able (as an option) to add shots the same way -- Thanks TIM
Hi guys any guide how to setup fleminco?