Render farm: is "pack all" all I need or should I do something more?

Question

I need to send scenes to a render farm, and I know there's an option called "pack all" which saves all the external data into the .blend file.

But is that enough? I was reading about cache files, and I don't know if that's included, or if I have to do something more.

Answer 1

For a simple example, what you suggest should, for the most part, be good.

I'd also like to add the following:

• Select Make Paths Relative in case someone wants to unpack the .blend file at a different location.
• Double check your output directory. Does it need to be set to a relative path? Does that path actually exist?
• If you're learning in this environment, it's good to test out your render by only rendering the first few frames with a low sample rate and smaller image size so you can get quick feedback in case something goes wrong.
• The bvh_* cache files can become quite large. If your home directory has a small quota, and you have a scratch environment or another drive you can dump them on, then the solution seems to be to remove the cache folder and link it to that other space.

On *nix systems, the cache folder is:
~/.config/blender/<blenderversion>/cache

On Mac, the cache folder is:
~/Library/Application Support/Blender/<blenderversion>/cache

On Windows, I'm not so sure, and I don't know how it changes from one version to the next.

You might want to read through this Blender Stack Exchange entry as well:
How can I change the directory used to cache BVM