Frequently Asked Questions

The more interesting changes in Flamenco versions are listed in the changelog.

OpenCue is aimed at a different audience than Flamenco. OpenCue is a large and complex project, and relies on a lot of components (source), whereas Flamenco is made for simplicity and use in small studios or at home, running on your own hardware.

Yes, absolutely. To support multiple platforms, first configure your Manager for its own platform (so if you run that on Linux, use Linux paths). Then you can use Two-way Variables to translate those paths to the other platforms.

Do note that Flamenco was developed on Linux, for the Linux-only Blender Studio. You may find issues that the developers did not run into themselves. If you do, please report a bug.

Blender needs to know which method to use (CUDA, Optix, etc.), and on which video card. This is something you’ll need to configure yourself. Start Blender on the worker machine, and then update the preferences. If you disabled automatic saving of preferences, be sure to save them before you quit Blender.

Also be sure to not use --factory-startup in your Blender CLI arguments, as that will reset Blender back to using the CPU. If you’re using bog-standard Flamenco settings, then don’t worry about this, it doesn’t use that option.

In short: not really, not only with Flamenco, anyway.

The issue is that Blender has no commandline options to reliably select the GPU(s) to use. The last information the Flamenco team heard of this was that certain drivers are unreliably reporting the GPU order when they are of identical make & model. So you could in theory tell Blender to run on GPU #1, and another Blender on GPU #2, but since the second Blender may see them in a different order, in the end both would use the same GPU, and one GPU would be idle.

A possible workarounds could be to have multiple copies of Blender on your computer, and using the utilities of your video card to configure each Blender copy to only use a specific GPU. Then run multiple Flamenco Workers on that machine, each having a different Blender on its $PATH.

Where Flamenco places the rendered files is determined by the job type. You can create your own custom job type or check the existing third-party job types to change this. With that, you can even add your own custom job settings like a sequence identifier and use that to determine the location of rendered files.

Flamenco does not support this at the moment. In theory this would be possible with a custom job type. With the Cycles render engine it might be possible it set up a set of tasks that each render a specific chunk of samples, and then merge those samples together for the final image.

If you have made a custom job type that does this, please contact us to get it added to the third-party jobs section.

This is possible with Flamenco, but it takes a bit of work. Although it’s not managed by Flamenco’s default job types, you can use a custom job type for this.

With that, you have control over the arguments that get used before and/or after the filename on the CLI.

There are Flamenco jobs out there that support compositor nodes, multi-platform, and multiple pass outputs. You can check our third-party jobs section.

If you wish to contribute to the project, you’re invited to get involved with Flamenco!

In short: No. Sharing files using Syncthing, OwnCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Onedrive, etc. is not supported by Flamenco. For more information, see Cloud Storage Services.

There can be a few causes for this, each with their own solution.

1. Check the Manager output on the terminal for any messages related to “auto-discovery” or “UPnP/SSDP”. Older versions of Spotify can interfere, so make sure to close that before you start the Manager.

2. Ensure that the Manager port is open in your firewall. On Windows, the system will prompt you for this during the initial setup. If you’re using a third-party firewall (sometimes presenting itself as anti-virus software), you may need to create a custom rule manually. The default port is 8080, which can be changed in the Manager configuration file.
3. If that doesn’t help, you’ll have to tell the Worker where it can find the Manager. This can be done on the commandline, by running it like flamenco-worker -manager http://192.168.0.1:8080/ (adjust the address to your situation) or more permanently by editing the worker configuration file.

When installing and starting the Flamenco Worker you may see a warning in the logs that says the Worker cannot find Blender.

WRN Blender could not be found. Flamenco Manager will have to supply the full path to Blender when Tasks are sent to this Worker. For more help see https://flamenco.blender.org/usage/variables/blender/

If Flamenco cannot locate Blender on the system it is possible to use a two-way variable named blender for each platform (eg: Windows, Linux, or MacOS). This path to Blender is then sent to the Worker for each render task. Note that the Worker will still show the warning at startup, as it cannot find Blender by itself; this is fine, because you now have configured the Manager to provide this path.

This means that you have to click on the little “Refresh” icon next to the job type:

When rendering a chunk of frames, Flamenco waits until Blender quits. This signals Flamenco that it finished rendering. Sometimes an add-on prevents Blender from quitting, and thus Flamenco will think it is still doing something. Disable add-ons one-by-one to see which one is causing this issue.

It means that the program (probably Blender) exited with an error status. Take a look at the task log, which you can access by going to the task in Flamenco’s web interface.

When a Worker connects to its Manager for the first time, it registers itself. This makes the Manager aware that the Worker exists. The Worker can now be seen in the web interface for configuration of tags and its sleep schedule.

If for some reason the Manager forgets about this Worker, the Manager will show this message. There are a few reasons this can happen:

After downloading a new version of Flamenco, you started the Manager from a different folder than before.

Stop the Manager (Ctrl+C) and follow the upgrade guide.

The flamenco-manager.sqlite file was deleted / moved.

Stop the Manager (Ctrl+C). Restore the file from the wastebin, or move it back. Then start the Manager again.

The Worker was deleted via the Flamenco Manager web interface.

This means the Worker info (its tags, sleep schedule, etc.) has been deleted. Stop the Worker (Ctrl+C) and restart it again. It will automatically re-register as a new Worker.

This is shown on the Manager after an “unknown worker is trying to communicate” message. It is also shown on the Worker for the same reason. See What does “unknown worker is trying to communicate” mean?

You may see double backslashes in Flamenco Manager’s log output, error messages, etc. To give an example, C:\path-to\myfile.blend may be shown as C:\\path-to\\myfile.blend. The technical reason for this is that the path separator \ has double duty, and in certain cases can also be used as an ’escape character’, denoting that the character following it should be treated specially. Common uses are a newline \n or a quote within quoted text: "They said \"hello\" to me". In such cases, a literal backslash should be escaped as well, and thus \ becomes \\.

In other words, even though it looks strange, this is not a bug in Flamenco. The aim is to prevent you from seeing these doublings as little as possible, but unfortunately it cannot always be avoided.

When your blend file references your assets (textures, linked blend files, etc.) with an absolute path, Flamenco assumes that this path is valid for all Workers, and will not copy those assets to the shared storage. This makes it possible to store large files, like simulation caches, on the shared storage, without Flamenco creating a copy for each render job.

Read more on this in Absolute vs. Relative Paths.