Sous Chef

Sous Chef is a tiny render queue utility designed to give lonely 3D artists (or small teams) a proper render management pipeline. It was designed for my own purposes, but I elected to open-source it in the event that someone else might find it useful.

Sous Chef facilitates queueing multiple jobs on a single machine. Its design is intentionally simplified to the bare bones. There's no clever machine-level assignments, sub-frame rendering or a separate networking structure. Everything is designed to work in existing file store infrastructure, whether that's a giant SAN, a little NAS or just the drives in your PC.

For a comprehensive overview of Sous Chef's features, you can read the manual.

Design & Philosophy

Unlike most farm tools that focus on distributing and managing render workloads across many computers, like Flamenco, Sous Chef is the opposite. It's more like a render allotment than a render farm.

Sous Chef designed for solo artists who need simple render queuing management as part of film or animation projects, or for small studios where rendering is typically done directly on the artists' workstations during downtime. Artists can build up queues throughout the day, lock assets and shots, guard them against short-term rogue edits by caching them and start the Sous Chef queue when they leave for the night.

Sous Chef also deals with day-to-day workflow snags like File Nodes. In complex scenes, rendering is so time consuming that many pipelines are built around saving render layers and passes to be composited in another file. In Blender, this is done with File Nodes, which are weird and awkward little things at the best of times. Worse, they can't be used instead of standard compositor output — the default output in the properties panel will always writing something during a render. When you generate a new order with Sous Chef, any custom output locations will be loaded and applied to the entire file, ensuring all output, including File Nodes, is is redirected to the new location. If you specify nothing, all of the original paths from the file are used instead.