Create impactful scientific visualisations from your laptop*!   (* also requires access to HPC)

BlenderRemoteRender (Brr) is a client-server tool for working with Blender, specifically in a research context. Blender is a free and powerful 3D design and rendering toolkit. Although it is used more and more by the research community for producing high quality scientific visualisations, its primarily target is 3D artists. One of the key workflow difference being that researchers, unlike 3D artists and studios, may not have access to powerful rendering hardware locally or render farms. They however usually have remote access to High Performance Computing (HPC) resources setup with a job scheduler. Brr allows researchers to work on their scenes and visualisations locally on a light client while seamlessly connecting to HPC resources and submitting jobs via their scheduler to render images and animations. Because animation rendering is an embarrassingly parallel problem - each frame being independent of each other - Brr maximises Blender's parallel performance by dynamically scheduling frames to single GPUs or single CPU nodes and working with multiple nodes.In practice, Brr is composed of a Blender addon on the client side and a Zero MQ server both implemented in Python. The server is tasked with receiving configuration and data files from the client, submitting jobs to a queue system (like slurm) and sending back progress status and rendered images.