QCBridge

QCBridge

QCBridge is a Blender extension that gives you a remote “beauty window”: you work in Blender on your own machine, while a second machine with a bigger GPU mirrors your scene, renders the full Cycles or Eevee preview, and streams it live into QCView. Your local Blender stays perfectly responsive; the remote render catches up to your edits in about a second.

It’s one extension with two roles — Host (the machine you work on) and Replica (the render box) — connected over your LAN or VPN. Sync is strictly one-way: the replica never edits anything and never touches your project files.

QCBridge is a working experiment, developed for production but tested mainly with a macOS host and a Windows replica. Expect rough edges.

Requirements

  • Blender 4.5 or newer on both machines (5.x is the working target).
  • Both machines on the same network, or connected by a VPN (WireGuard-class works well).
  • The project files reachable from both machines — typically shared network storage.
  • For streaming into QCView: QCView 2.2.4+ installed on the replica (it provides the ffmpeg that QCBridge uses to encode). Without it, set an ffmpeg path manually in the addon preferences — or skip streaming entirely and view the replica over Parsec/RDP instead.

Installation

Download the extension zip from the QCBridge releases and install it on both machines: in Blender, go to Edit → Preferences → Get Extensions, click the dropdown arrow (top-right), choose Install from Disk…, and pick the zip. Or from a terminal:

blender --command extension install-file -r user_default -e qcbridge-0.1.0.zip

Updating later is the same step with a newer zip — your settings survive updates (they’re also mirrored to a file that survives a full remove-and-reinstall).

Setup

Open Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → QC Bridge on each machine.

On the replica (the render box):

QCBridge

  1. Set Role to Replica.
  2. Set Bind Address to the machine’s LAN or VPN IP (or leave 0.0.0.0 to listen on all interfaces).
  3. Choose a Session Token — any short phrase; both machines must use the same one. It also encrypts the stream.
  4. Leave Pixel Stream on for QCView viewing (the encoder costs nothing until a viewer connects), or turn it off if you’ll watch over remote desktop instead.
  5. Leave Kiosk Mode on — the replica strips itself down to a clean fullscreen viewport when a session runs. (Ctrl+Alt+K toggles it manually; Ctrl+Q still quits Blender from inside it.)

On the host (your workstation):

QCBridge

  1. Set Role to Host.
  2. Set Replica Address to the replica’s IP.
  3. Enter the same Session Token.
  4. If host and replica are different platforms sharing network storage, add Path Mappings — one row per storage root, e.g. C:\Volumes\studio-nas\jobs ↔ /Volumes/studio-nas/jobs — so file paths translate between them.

Windows note: the stream arrives over UDP. If QCView can’t connect to the replica, allow the stream port through the replica’s firewall (default 9998):

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="QCBridge SRT" dir=in action=allow protocol=UDP localport=9998

Using it

QCBridge

Start Blender on both machines and press Start Session in the QC Bridge panel (sidebar of the 3D viewport, N key) — replica first, then host. The replica automatically loads whatever file the host has open and starts following: camera, timeline, lighting, materials, node edits, visibility — modeling changes take a moment longer. Opening a different project on the host? The replica follows that too. No further touching of the replica machine is needed; ending the session on the host drops the replica to an idle viewport, and the next session picks it back up.

QCBridge

From the host panel:

  • Open in QCView — launches QCView on the live stream, named after your blend file. (Or Copy Stream URL for any other SRT-capable player.)
  • Shot Mode — locks the replica to the camera frame: fitted to the stream, matted in black, holding steady while you orbit your scene freely. The timeline still follows. This framing matches your render output.
  • Replica Zoom −/+/reset — punches the replica’s camera view in or out without changing your own viewport.
  • Pause Sync — holds your edits back (queued, not lost) while you try something messy; resume flushes them.
  • Force Resync — resyncs the whole file if something is updating naturally (there is a lot that hasn’t been tested yet).

The stream itself always tells you the truth: sync status, a sequence counter, and a clock are burned into the corner of the picture (● live · seq 42 · 14:03:22.5), so you can always tell live from stale — and measure your glass-to-glass latency against your own menu-bar clock.

If something’s off

The host panel names problems rather than hiding them: an unreachable or mistyped replica address, a token mismatch, a missing ffmpeg on the replica, or the replica’s encoder state (replica stream: streaming / restarting). If QCView sits at “reconnecting” while the panel says the stream is running, it’s almost always the replica’s firewall (see the UDP rule above).

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