Using docker for Rendering Blender Projects ~ Starting Research

I need more power!!!

For some background, I make custom cookie cutters on the internet and I recently started rendering videos of my cutters for things like Instagram, Twitter, Patreon, and Etsy. It's a simple business that I do for my mother. Below is an example of one of my finished renders after some editing in Adobe After Effects.

Here are some renders of the cutters available on my patreon. More renders coming soon. pic.twitter.com/MJNsyYnK6I

— Brian Almaguer (@BulmaBrian) December 13, 2020

Every 11 second video I render from blender is about 2.3 gigabytes in size. The whole process takes about 2+ hours minimum. Needless to say, I really want to get this under 2 hours. This sparked a fun idea. I want to make a blender farm from my raspberry pi cluster using docker and or Kubernetes.

Current thoughts

To be perfectly honest, I don't know what I am doing but I believe I know the direction I should be going. These are my current thoughts:

1. Make a base container with blender installed.
2. Check if blender can identify a container as a rendering node.
3. Set up a docker compose file to network containers together.
4. Look into passing a graphics card into container.
5. Establish a benchmarking blender file.

Next Steps of Development

Open a GitHub for testing and research.