BlenderRender

Dockerized Blender Flamenco render farm with NVIDIA GPU support.

What This Is

A self-hosted render farm using Flamenco (Blender's official render farm manager). Friends can submit Blender render jobs to your GPU over a VPN.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Your Machine (Docker + NVIDIA GPU)     │
│  ┌─────────────────┐ ┌────────────────┐ │
│  │ flamenco-manager│ │ flamenco-worker│ │
│  │     :8080       │ │   (GPU)        │ │
│  └─────────────────┘ └────────────────┘ │
│            │                  │         │
│            └────────┬─────────┘         │
│                     │                   │
│         /mnt/blender/flamenco           │
│              (NAS mount)                │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘
                      │
                    VPN
                      │
┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Friend's Machine                       │
│  ┌─────────────────────────────────┐    │
│  │ Blender + Flamenco Add-on       │    │
│  └─────────────────────────────────┘    │
│            │                            │
│  /mnt/blender/flamenco (SMB mount)      │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘

Requirements

• Docker with NVIDIA Container Toolkit
• NVIDIA GPU with recent drivers
• NAS or shared storage accessible via NFS/SMB
• VPN (Netbird, Tailscale, WireGuard, etc.)

Quick Start

1. Mount shared storage

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/blender/flamenco
sudo mount -t nfs NAS_IP:/path/to/share /mnt/blender/flamenco

2. Start the stack

docker compose up -d

3. Initial setup

• Open http://localhost:8080
• Complete the Flamenco setup wizard
• Set storage path: /mnt/blender/flamenco
• Set Blender path: /opt/blender/blender

4. Share with friends

• Give them VPN access
• They mount the same storage via SMB
• They install the Flamenco add-on from http://YOUR_IP:8080/flamenco3-addon.zip

Configuration

Versions

Edit Dockerfile ARGs to update:

ARG FLAMENCO_VERSION=3.7
ARG BLENDER_VERSION_SHORT=4.2
ARG BLENDER_VERSION_FULL=4.2.2

Storage Path

Update the volume mount in docker-compose.yml:

volumes:
  - /your/mount/path:/mnt/blender/flamenco

Updating

# Pull latest or rebuild
docker compose build --no-cache
docker compose up -d

Troubleshooting

GPU not detected:

# Verify nvidia-container-toolkit
docker run --rm --gpus all nvidia/cuda:12.6.2-base-ubuntu24.04 nvidia-smi

Worker can't connect to manager:

• Check both containers are running: docker compose ps
• Check logs: docker compose logs flamenco-worker

Jobs fail immediately:

• Ensure .blend files are saved to the shared storage path
• Ensure output paths are also on shared storage

License

MIT