Shared Storage

Flamenco needs some form of shared storage: a place for files to be stored that can be accessed by all the computers in the farm.

Basically there are three approaches to this:

Approach	Simple	Efficient	Render jobs are isolated
Work directly on the shared storage	✅	✅	❌
Create a copy for each render job	✅	❌	✅
Shaman Storage System	❌	✅	✅

Each is explained below.

On Windows, Flamenco only supports drive letters to indicate locations. Flamenco does not support UNC notation like \\SERVER\share. Mount the network share to a drive letter. The examples below use S: for this.

Work Directly on the Shared Storage

Working directly in the shared storage is the simplest way to work with Flamenco. You can enable this mode by pointing Flamenco at the location of your blend files.

As an example, if S:\WorkArea is where your blend files live (or in a subdirectory thereof), you can update your flamenco-manager.yaml like this:

shared_storage_path: S:\WorkArea
shaman:
  enabled: false

When you submit a file from the shared storage, say S:\WorkArea\project\scene\shot\anim.blend, Flamenco will detect this and assume the Workers can reach the file there. No copy will be made.

This “work on shared storage” approach has the downside that render jobs are not fully separated from each other. For example, when you change a texture while a render job is running, the subsequently rendered frames will be using that altered texture. If this is an issue for you, keep reading.

Creating a Copy for Each Render Job

This approach will create a directory for the job, on the shared storage. It will copy the submitted blend file, and all its dependencies, to that directory. Because of this, each render job has its own set of files, and is independent from other render jobs.

As an example, when C:\WorkArea is where you work on your blend files, and S:\Flamenco is the shared storage for Flamenco, you will automatically use this approach. You can update your flamenco-manager.yaml like this:

shared_storage_path: S:\Flamenco
shaman:
  enabled: false

As you can see, you do not have to tell Flamenco about C:\WorkArea, it’ll automatically detect which storage approach to use from the path of the blend file you’re submitting.

The downside of this approach is that each render job has a completely independent set of files. This means that file submission can be slow, because for each render job all its dependencies will be copied. This can be avoided with the Shaman system, explained below.

Shaman Storage System

The Shaman system ensures that files are only copied once to the render farm.

This is explained in a page of its own; see Shaman Storage System.

Cloud Storage Services

Sharing files using Syncthing, OwnCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Onedrive, etc. is not supported by Flamenco.

Flamenco assumes that once a file has been written by one worker, it is immediately available to any other worker, like what you’d get with a NAS. Similarly, it assumes that when a job has been submitted, it can be worked on immediately.

Such assumptions no longer hold true when using an asynchronous service like SyncThing, Dropbox, etc.

Note that this is not just about the initially submitted files. Flamenco creates a video from the rendered images; this also assumes that those images are accessible after they’ve been rendered and saved to the storage.

It might be possible to create a complex custom job type for this, but that’s all untested. The hardest part is to know when all necessary files have arrived on a specific worker, without waiting for all syncing to be completed (as someone may have just submitted another job).

Absolute vs. Relative Paths

Blender can reference assets (textures, linked blend files, etc.) in two ways:

by relative path, like //textures\my-favourite-brick.exr, which is relative to the blend file, or
by absolute path, like D:\texture-library\my-favourite-brick.exr, which is the full path of the file.

When an asset is referenced by 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.

On Windows it is not possible to construct a relative path to an asset when that asset is on a different drive than the main blend file. If you still want Flamenco to copy such assets, there are two workarounds:

Move your asset libraries to the same drive as your Blender projects.

Use symbolic links to make your assets available at a suitable path.