Variables

For managing default parameters for Blender and FFmpeg, as well as for mixed-platform render farms, Flamenco uses variables.

Each variable consists of:

Its name: just a sequence of letters, like blender or whateveryouwant.
Its values: per platform and audience, described below.

The variables are configured in flamenco-manager.yaml.

Here is an example blender variable:

variables:
  blender:
    values:
    - platform: linux
      value: /home/sybren/Downloads/blenders/blender-3.2.2-release/blender
    - platform: windows
      value: B:\Downloads\blenders\blender-3.2.2-release\blender.exe
    - platform: darwin
      value: /home/sybren/Downloads/blenders/blender-3.2.2-release/blender

Whenever a Worker gets a task that contains {blender}, that’ll be replaced by the appropriate value for that worker.

Platform

The goal of the variables system is to cater for different platforms. Blender will very likely be installed in different locations on Windows and Linux. It might even require some different parameters for your farm, depending on the platform. The variables system allows you to configure this.

The platform can be windows, linux, or darwin for macOS. Other platforms are also allowed, if you happen to use them in your farm.

Two-way Variables for Mixed-platform Farms

Variables are not just used to point to specific things, like blender above. They can also tell Flamenco that the path /media/shared/flamenco on Linux is the same as S:\flamenco on Windows, or /Volumes/shared/flamenco on macOS. This is documented further in Two-way Variables for Multi-Platform Support.

Custom Job Types

This documentation section focuses on pre-existing variables, blender and blenderArgs. There is nothing special about these. Apart from being part of Flamenco’s default configuration, that is. When you go the more advanced route of creating your own custom job types you’re free to create your own set of variables to suit your needs.

Advanced: Audience

The audience of a value is who that value is for: workers, users, or all if there is no difference in value for workers and users.

This is an advanced feature, and was introduced for in-the-cloud render farms. In such situations, the location where the workers store the rendered frames might be different from where users go to pick them up.

all: values that are used for all audiences. This is the default, and is what’s used in the above example (because there is no audience mentioned).
users: values are used when submitting jobs from Blender and showing them in the web interface.
workers: values that are used when sending tasks to workers.