How do I set a specific render engine while launching blender?

Question

I have noticed that Blender Internal Render Engine is the default engine that is set when launching Blender. Users can change this behavior by setting a different engine and saving the user preferences.

My question is, is it possible to choose the engine to be used by blender when launching blender?

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered May 31 '13 at 11:19

Yes, it is possible.

There are lots of command-line flags provided by Blender and the flags that are related to rendering engine type are -E engine or --engine engine

So, to launch Blender with the CYCLES rendering engine set, the following command can be used.

blender --engine CYCLES

You can get a list of available engines by using

blender --engine help

or

blender -E help

Example output

found bundled python: /home/satishg/bin/blender-2.65a-linux-glibc27-x86_64/2.65/python
Blender Engine Listing:
    BLENDER_RENDER
    BLENDER_GAME
    CYCLES

[1]    Done                          ~/bin/blender-2.65a-linux-glibc27-x86_64/blender --engine help

Also see related http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/313/12 and http://blender.stackexchange.com/q/80/12 — iKlsR, May 31 '13 at 12:47

ideasman42 · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-01T13:05:03.380

5

Looks like you figured this out, just note that you can enable addons on startup too:

blender --addons my_render_engine --engine MY_RENDER_ENGINE

If you want to enable multiple addons...

blender --addons my_render_engine,some_other_addon --engine MY_RENDER_ENGINE

Where the add-on list is comma separated list of module names (no spaces), the engine argument works as normal.

See the manual for documentation on these args.

edited Jun 01 '16 at 13:05

answered May 31 '13 at 12:24

ideasman42

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This is a late comment, but thanks for that addon enabling tip. – satishgoda Jun 03 '17 at 03:32

How do I set a specific render engine while launching blender?

2 Answers2