How to do Blender Rendering using Amazon AWS’ GPU

Fajrul Falah
2 min readMay 20, 2020

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Graphic rendering is painful and this is the way to do it seamlessly

Doing 3D modeling is fun.

But when it comes to the rendering process… uhh, it sucks!

A simple 10-second animation that I created using Blender can take ages to render. To be specific, it needs about 5 hours.

Add some nice background, blur effect, camera’s depth of field, and it takes about 1 day straight to render using my laptop.

So I need to find another solution, and then I found about Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Service) that has cloud instances with powerful GPU.

For example, P2 instance from AWS has up to 16 NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs.

Source: healthbeat.cz

Here’s the documentation on how I set up Amazon Web Services GPU for Blender rendering.

(This post is inspired by an article from Mikuláš and I came up with the code from HelloWillie for the installation)

You can watch video version of this tutorial on Youtube

Machine Setup

  • Amazon EC2: P or G type instances (I use P2 instance p2.xlarge)
  • Linux 18.04 LTS as the Amazon Machine Image system

Installing NVIDIA Drivers

Reboot the instance and then test with nvidia-smi command to check whether the installation success or not.

Installing Blender

Script to Enable GPU Rendering

Example render command

That’s all. That simple!

Using AWS cloud rendering, I can speed up my rendering time up to 93% — from 10 minutes per frame became 40 seconds per frame.

Here is one of my projects that rendered using AWS:

*This is my just-for-fun project beside of Saintif website

Hope this helps. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below.

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