A Pointman extension for Blender on a node. It makes previews of 3D files: a still and a USDZ, which opens in 3D and AR on an iPhone or iPad. It also renders a .blend's frames in the background on the machine's GPU. A render keeps the frames already on disk, so it resumes after a stop, and its progress shows live on the board: frames done, seconds a frame, time left and the device in use.

Python (standard library only), run by the node on Python 3.12. Blender's own Python runs the two scripts in pointman_blender/ that do the work inside Blender.

pointman add blender

• Blender, found by itself at /Applications/Blender.app on macOS, /usr/bin/blender, /opt/blender/blender or NixOS's system path on Linux, C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation on Windows, or on the PATH. The blender_path setting points it at another install.
• A GPU for fast renders: Metal, OptiX, CUDA, HIP or oneAPI, whichever Blender's Cycles finds. Without one it renders on the CPU.

A .blend's own scripts never run (-Y), whatever Blender's preferences say, and the .blend is never saved.

Agents get each as a tool (blender_preview, blender_render), or call it on a machine with create_job.

• frames is 1-250 or 1,5,10-20. Left out, it's the scene's range.
• output is a folder on the machine. Left out, frames go where the .blend says. Either way it must be in a folder the node allows.
• Resuming: Blender skips a frame whose file is already there and claims the one it's rendering with an empty placeholder. So a stopped render picks up where it left off, two machines can share one output folder, and a stop clears the claim on the frame it was in the middle of.
• The result: the folder of frames as a sequence, and how many were rendered, kept, claimed by another machine, or missing.
• Across machines: asked with split, one render is shared by every machine running Blender, each taking runs of frames as it's free, and the parts are joined into one video at the end.

On a Mac a .blend gets "Open in Blender", and a 3D file in any of the formats above is shown through blender.preview.

blender.status, every 15 s: whether Blender is installed, its path and version, the GPUs Cycles sees, the device in use, the render under way, and what else is using the GPU (DaVinci Resolve, another Blender render, or CUDA processes on Linux).

Per machine, in ~/.config/pointman/extensions/blender/config.toml, or pointman config set node.extensions.blender.<key> <value>: