Is there no way of rendering headless using EEVEE?

Question

I am using a computer without good graphics card and a remote LINUX server with a K40 Tesla card. I am operating on a remote server by MobaX to get the rendering working. For now I'm using Cycles to render and everything works just fine, here is my command:

blender -b -noaudio /Path/to/File/NAME.blend -P /Path/to/scripts/linux_enable_GPU.py -P /Path/to/demo/run.py -o //results/part{variable}.mp4 -a -- variable 

The linux_enable_GPU.py helps me to enable the GPU as well as setting the engine to Cycles and Cuda and the run.py helps me to create actions.

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However, sometimes it is quite expensive to render a simple scene using Cycles so I'd like to use Eevee to render my animations.

I tried lot to make it work. According to the official guide, I use:

blender -b  -noaudio test_eevee.blend -E BLENDER_EEVEE -a 

to call for Eevee engine but it failed. In debug mode I get:

Version 280 sub 39 date unknown hash unknown /run/user/1205/gvfs/ non-existent directory Read blend: /home/blender/works/demo/test_eevee.blend read file /home/blender/works/demo/test_eevee.blend Version 292 sub 15 date 2021-02-24 16:25 hash 02948a2cab44 Writing: /tmp/test_eevee.crash.txt Segmentation fault (core dumped)

And in debug-all mode I get a lot of errors:

Seems that Eevee does not support headless rendering: Headless Eevee rendering However, it seems that we can fake a display to use Eevee. But the script in that Q&A is not crystal clear and I'm using Blender 2.92 version.

Is there any way to render headless using EEVEE?

Answer 1

Check my self answered question here:

How do you use Eevee renderer in a Docker container using bpy?

It's instructions for how to use Eevee in a container, but the instructions are directly translatable to your scenario.

Basically what you would do is create a service that starts xvfb.

Fair warning though, in my experience Eevee doesn't have nearly as impressive a speedup when run in this manner. Not sure if it's because xvfb doesn't offer the best performance, but after I tested for a while I decided to simply stick to Cycles when running in a headless environment. Eevee was faster, but an image that took maybe 5 seconds to render when running Eevee on my actual computer took like 10 times longer running as a container, whereas Cycles was maybe 3 times longer.

So, for me at least, my result was that:

Eevee = 5 seconds per frame * 10 times slowdown = 50 seconds per frame using xvfb

Cycles = 30 seconds per frame * 3 times slowdown = 1 minute 30 seconds per frame, doesn't require xvfb

So again, for me Eevee was still faster, and rendering roughly 30% faster is still nice, but I so vastly prefer the results from Cycles that it didn't feel worth the added hassle just to get a worse result faster. When Eevee was vastly superior in performance I could live with a less appealing result, but headless Eevee led me to prefer the idea of running multiple Cycles renders simultaneously on multiple servers then merging the results.