Thank you, had no idea about ProRender and haven’t thought of offloading the renders to EC2. Looks like using a spot P2 instance could be really cost-effective (if prices keep at reasonable levels), definitely worth trying first.
There is a useful tool for this called brenda. The original repo by creator James Yonan hasn't been updated in years, so it uses an old version of Blender by default, doesn’t allow you to choose availability zone (which affects pricing), and doesn't support GPU rendering out of the box. I forked it [0] to address these issues for my own use, and updated the documentation to try and make it easier for people to get started.
I actually saw brenda come up a few times while researching readbeard’s suggestions, as you said the original seemed not super up-to-date. Thank you for mentioning your fork! Going to try in the next couple of days.
Even if my experiments won’t justify spinning up multiple instances, this should greatly reduce setup overhead.
> to try and make it easier for people to get started
What do you think about putting a simple GUI in front of this toolset—for those not proficient with CLI (I imagine many 3D artists using Blender may fall into that category)? I’ve been doing something similar as part of a consulting job recently, so couldn’t help thinking along those lines… Would be happy to help make it more accessible, should be an interesting exercise.
