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I recently visited the seaworld design museum in shenzhen. I really enjoyed the exhibit and found it to be energizing and inspiring. While perusing one of the businesses inside the museum's building I came across a plate that had a thick body and an off-center cavity. Inspired by the plate's form I had the idea to design some thick bodied cocktail glasses that would use the thermal mass of glass as a whiskey stone to keep their contents cool. When I got home I quickly sketched out some ideas in blender since I'm familiar with it's modelling tools and wanted to easily visualize the transparency of the material. While I plan to make more precise sketches in free-CAD later, I'll first need to learn more about its workflow.

For now I'd like to upload a few renders of my sketches and rather than individually set up each render I'd like to take some time to find a way to automate some of the work of rendering similar shots of each sketch.

Possible Solutions:

It occurs to me that since I want to use one set and simply cycle through a set of objects I could probably render avery short animation and use the frame number to index through a list of objects rendering each object on successive frames. However, I remember reading about an addon or workflow in a blog one time that was meant to speed up the owrk of rendering out multiple shots of a product for commercial b-roll and think that might also be something interesting to learn about. A cursory websearch for blender batch rendering reveals that blender also has a command line tool, though it doesn't appear granular enough for what I want at first glance. I also found a few different add-ons:

  • Render-Burst from Gleb Alexandrov and co, written for blender 2.8, which renders from each camera in a blendfile in sequence.
  • Batch render which can render isolated views and turn tables of multiple meshes in a directory using blender as a render engine and to apply materials/textures, but doesn't embed said objects in a scene.
  • Batch Render Creator which appears to be a gui for blender's own command line render tools.
  • Render+ appears to be a more polished, paid version of Render-Burst from a different developer

It seems like for what I want the best tools would be some combination of Render Burst and animation or using Render+.

update: I've installed renderburst and it indeed can render from multiple cameras in the scene, it was written for blender 2.8 and seems to have lost some of its functionality with blender 3.5. So i will either proceed manually or buy render+