About this asset
Set up your renders, start the queue, go to bed. Nightshift Render Queue is a render queue that lives inside Blender. You can add shots from the file you are working on, every camera in a scene, every view layer, or other .blend files entirely. Give each job its own frames, resolution, samples and output, press Start Queue, and keep working. Each job renders in its own background Blender process, so Blender stays responsive.
If something goes wrong overnight, such as a crash, a frozen render or a power cut, start the queue again. Nightshift skips every job and frame that is already finished and carries on from the first missing frame. Each frame is written to a temporary file and renamed only when complete, so a crash never leaves a broken frame that looks finished.
Jobs render one after another on the computer Nightshift is running on. Image sequences can resume part-way through. Video jobs start again from the first frame, so render a sequence when you need resume. It is not a network render farm.
Features
- Queue any number of .blend files, the current file, or several picked at once
- Add a job for every camera in the scene
- Render one view layer per job, or all enabled layers
- Choose any scene inside a file
- Use the scene frame range, a custom start, end and step, or a single frame
- Per-job overrides for engine (Cycles, EEVEE or Workbench), resolution percent, samples, format and output path, without modifying the .blend
- Output formats: PNG, JPEG, OpenEXR, OpenEXR MultiLayer, TIFF, WebP and FFmpeg video
- File-name tokens: {blend}, {scene}, {camera}, {layer}, {job} and {frame}
- Resume that skips finished frames, with crash-safe writes and automatic retries
- Optional stall watchdog, and the choice to keep going after a broken job or stop on the first error
- Desktop notification, plus optional Discord, Slack or ntfy.sh messages
- Optional sleep or shut down after the queue, with a countdown you can cancel
- Progress per job, a live log, and a log file for every run
- Save, load and autosave queues as JSON
- Command-line runner for a saved queue, with exit codes for scripts
- Found in the 3D Viewport sidebar (N > Nightshift), Output Properties and the Render menu
- Full user guide included
Compatibility
Blender 4.2 LTS to 5.2. Install it as an Extension, or use the included legacy add-on zip. Automated tests cover Cycles, EEVEE and Workbench. License: GPL-3.0-or-later.
Tags
- render queue
- batch render
- render manager
- background render
- view layers
- resume
- automation
- blender
- ntfy
