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There was already a similar question asked, but I want to render the scene backwards for a different reason: render speed.

I want to split the animation rendering between two PCs, so the first PC would start rendering at frame 0 and going up to 5000 and the second would start at the frame 5000 and going down to frame 0.

They would eventually meet at some point, let's say first PC would render 3000 frames and the second one 2000 frames = finished animation.

Is there a way in Blender Cycles to render a scene backwards instead of forward? I mean, you can go backwards on the timeline and everything works just fine so this should be possible, right?

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    $\begingroup$ An other way would be to set up the two computers to save renders in a shared folder (a NAS, a Dropbox or whatever). In Render/Output, check Placeholder (so each computer will create a empty file before rendering, to 'save the slot') ; and uncheck Overwrite (so each computer won't start rendering a reserved frame). $\endgroup$
    – thibsert
    May 2, 2019 at 22:57
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for your suggestion, that is definitely one way around it, but it is not what I need. The thing is that I have very bad experience with skipping frames or otherwise weirdly behaving meshes when there is .abc mesh sequence in the scene, like water simulation. So with shared HDD, going from frame 1 to e.g. 5 is a risk, it might not follow correctly. Basically an absolute independence of those two PCs is what I want the most and I think rendering backwards would be a great & super simple solution to this. $\endgroup$
    – veru_z
    May 3, 2019 at 2:47

1 Answer 1

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This Python script will step through your frames in reverse and render them one-by-one. Save as render-backward.py:

import bpy

for frame in range(bpy.context.scene.frame_end, 1, -1):
    bpy.context.scene.frame_set(frame)
    bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True)

Run it like so:

blender yourfile.blend -b -P render-backward.py
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  • $\begingroup$ If the above answered the question, please mark the answer as "accepted". Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – pixelbath
    Jun 27, 2019 at 17:47

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