What is Neural Render?

Neural Render is a Blender add-on that integrates AI models from Replicate into your Blender workflow. It allows you to process rendered images with AI, enhancing their quality and resolution or generating new images based on your renders directly within Blender.

Why Replicate? While we can use local models for inference, making the project truly open-source, the first version was built on top of Replicate – cloud computing provider, to ensure we can run any models in the cloud with great speed and quality. I plan to publish updates on this workflow when we’ll be closer to on-device image inference.

Render Will Never Be The Same

While traditional render still is very important and nothing can be compared to its flexibility, there are already many applications AI render could be better, or even replace the traditional approach. I will show you some of the recently discovered.

Pre-Visualization

With no need to spend hours in light and textures research, we can quickly visualize any scene with the needed textures, light, environment, and anything we can imagine to get the final look we wanted to see. Here is an example based on this scene from Skethfab.

Proof Of Concept

When it’s too lazy to model a whole scene, make a layout, or create detailed models, we can visualize a whole picture by rendering simple blocking with a single prompt, while experimenting with its variations by toggling parameters.

AI Render As Art

For art creators, it could be the best way to create something truly magical, by turning 3D scenes into dozens of creative variations, reimagining them, or totally distracting the reality with AI capabilities within Blender scenes.

Current Features:

Upscale and enhance rendered images using Clarity Upscaler
Generate new images based on your renders using Control Net
Customizable parameters for AI processing
Seamless integration with Blender's render pipeline
Support for various Stable Diffusion models and control types
Options for tiling, downscaling, and custom LoRA models

You can find the detailed instructions on how to install and use the add-on below, along with the code and necessary requirements. Be open to contributing and adding any information or examples directly into the GitHub repo.

Blender Neural Render On GitHub

Installation

Download the addon ZIP file
In Blender, go to Edit > Preferences > Add-ons
Click "Install" and select the downloaded ZIP file
Enable the "Render: Neural Render" addon

If you encounter issues with missing dependencies when installing the addon, you can manually install the required packages. Here's how:

Method 1 (Works for Mac, may work for some Windows setups):

Open Blender's Script Editor
Create a new text file
Paste and run the following Python code:

import sys
import subprocess
subprocess.check_call([sys.executable, '-m', 'pip', 'install', 'replicate'])

Restart Blender
Try enabling the Neural Render addon again

Method 2 (Alternative for Windows users):

If Method 1 doesn't work on your Windows system, follow these steps:

Locate your Blender installation folder. It's typically in: C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 4.2
Open Windows File Explorer and navigate to this folder
In the address bar at the top, type cmd and press Enter. This will open a Command Prompt window in the Blender folder
In the Command Prompt, type the following command and press Enter:

4.2\python\bin\python.exe -m pip install replicate

Wait for the installation to complete. You should see a success message
Close the Command Prompt and restart Blender
Try enabling the Neural Render addon again

These methods should install the necessary 'replicate' package in Blender's Python environment. If you're still experiencing issues, please check our GitHub repository for the most up-to-date troubleshooting tips.

Usage

Set up your Replicate API key in the addon preferences
Go to the Properties panel > Render tab > Neural Render section
Choose the AI model you want to use (Clarity Upscaler or Control Net)
Adjust the AI processing parameters as needed
Click the "Neural Render" button to process your render with AI

Requirements

Blender 4.2.0 or higher
Active internet connection
Replicate account
Replicate API key

Credits

Developed by Alex Nix
Powered by Replicate and the Clarity Upscaler model
Built for Blender, the free and open source 3D creation suite
Flux Control Net model by xlabs-ai
Control Net model by jagilley
Cursor AI for everything else