Holodeck

Holodeck is a command-line tool that renders Blender animations as slide decks that can be viewed in a web browser.

Because Holodeck works with pre-rendered frames, it can produce slide decks with higher visual fidelity than a tool like Google Slides, while still feeling real-time during a presentation.

Holodeck renders frames as avif images, which has excellent compression and is supported in all browsers.

Gallery:

• the demo in this repository
• Brute Force Correctness (GraphQLConf 2026)

Quickstart

1. Download Holodeck

Download the latest Holodeck asset for your system from the Releases page. Choose the macOS, Linux, or Windows archive for a standalone executable.

Unpack the archive and put the holodeck executable somewhere on your PATH. Then check that it runs:

holodeck --help

Blender must also be available on your PATH unless you pass a specific Blender executable with --blender.

If none of the standalone executable assets match your system, download the PEX asset instead. The PEX requires Python 3.11 or newer:

python path/to/holodeck.pex --help

The examples below use holodeck. If you use the PEX asset, replace holodeck with python path/to/holodeck.pex.

2. Configure Your Blend File

Holodeck reads presentation timing from the active Blender scene:

• The scene frame range controls which frames are exported.
• The scene FPS controls playback speed in the browser.
• Timeline markers define slide boundaries and pause points.
• Marker names are ignored; only marker frame numbers matter.

In Blender, add timeline markers with M on the frames where the presentation should pause. During playback, pressing space or tapping advances from the current marker to the next marker.

3. Build Your Holodeck

Run build with a source .blend file and an output directory:

holodeck build path/to/deck.blend dist --title "My Deck"

build renders the frames, writes manifest.json, and installs the browser player assets into the output directory. The result is a static site that can be served locally or uploaded to a static host. By default, Holodeck renders both animation frames and the first, marker, and last frames at 100% resolution over the same filenames.

Useful build options:

• --scene renders a specific Blender scene instead of the active scene.
• --animation-res-pct sets the Blender render resolution percentage for animation frames. The default is 100.
• --animation-scale-pct scales animation frames after rendering while preserving full-size originals in render-source/. The default is 100.
• --still-res-pct sets the resolution percentage for first, marker, and last frames. The default is 100.
• --animation-renderer overrides the Blend file renderer for animation frames.
• --still-renderer overrides the Blend file renderer for first, marker, and last frames.
• --stills-only renders first, marker, and last frames and writes a stills-only manifest.
• --title sets the generated player page title.

4. Play Your Holodeck Locally

Use serve to preview an existing Holodeck output directory:

holodeck serve dist

By default, the server binds to port 8000 and opens the player in your default browser. You can override either behavior:

holodeck serve dist --port 9000
holodeck serve dist --no-open

Common presenter shortcuts:

• Press space or tap to animate to the next marker. A small white pixel appears in the bottom-right corner of the visible frame while animation is running.
• Press the left or right arrow keys to jump between markers.
• Press F or swipe up to enter fullscreen.

Before animating, the player fetches the full frame segment up to the next marker and decodes a short runway. This keeps S3 or other static-host latency out of the animation loop.

5. Refresh Your Holodeck

Use refresh when the rendered frame files already exist, but the player bundle or manifest needs to be regenerated. A common example is moving timeline markers after rendering; refresh can update manifest.json without re-rendering every frame.

holodeck refresh path/to/deck.blend dist --title "My Deck"

refresh reads the Blend file metadata, verifies that the expected rendered frames exist, rewrites manifest.json, and reinstalls the browser player assets. If the actual frame images changed, use build or render-frames instead.

6. Deploy Your Holodeck

A built Holodeck output directory is a static site and can be uploaded to any static site host, such as GitHub Pages, S3, CloudFront, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages.

For GitHub Pages, publish the output directory as your Pages artifact or copy it to the branch or directory configured for Pages. If you publish from a directory named docs/, add a .nojekyll file so GitHub Pages serves the bundled assets without Jekyll processing.

For S3, sync the output directory to a bucket configured for static website hosting or serve it through CloudFront:

aws s3 sync dist s3://your-bucket/path/ \
  --exclude "*" \
  --include "render/*" \
  --include "render-source/*" \
  --cache-control "public, max-age=31536000, immutable"

aws s3 sync dist s3://your-bucket/path/ \
  --exclude "render/*" \
  --exclude "render-source/*" \
  --cache-control "no-cache"

The player uses relative asset paths, so the same output can be served from a domain root or a subdirectory. Frame URLs include a manifest token, so rendered frames can be cached aggressively while manifest.json and player assets stay fresh.

Tips And Tricks

Render A Subset Of Frames

Use render-frames with --frames when only a few frame images need to be re-rendered:

holodeck render-frames path/to/deck.blend dist --frames "48,72-96"

Frame ranges are inclusive, and comma-separated segments are allowed. For example, "4", "4-10", and "1,2,3,20-24" are all valid frame specs.

render-frames updates files under render/, but it does not update manifest.json. Use it for small visual changes when the timing, markers, and scene length have not changed.

Workbench Rendering

Renderer overrides let each Holodeck render pass use a different Blender renderer without changing the saved setting in the .blend file. If you omit a renderer override, that pass uses the renderer already configured in the file.

Workbench rendering is useful when you want fast feedback on timing, camera motion, and animation. You can render the whole deck with Workbench first:

holodeck build path/to/deck.blend dist --animation-renderer workbench

After the timing feels right, you can re-render selected frames or ranges with the renderers you want for each pass. This is useful when only part of the deck needs more visual polish:

holodeck render-frames path/to/deck.blend dist --frames "48,72-96" --animation-renderer cycles

Rescale Animation Frames Without Rerendering

Use --animation-scale-pct when you want Blender to render animation frames at full resolution, but ship smaller animation frames in the browser bundle:

holodeck build path/to/deck.blend dist --animation-scale-pct 50

This is particularly useful for:

• long decks
• animation heavy decks
• high fps decks
• eevee-rendered decks

This is similar to --animation-res-pct in that they can both reduce the download size of animation frames, but different in some key ways. While --animation-res-pct can significantly improve render times, it can produce visible artifacts in eevee-rendered decks when transitioning from animated frames to still frames. --animation-res-pct is immune from visible artifacts in eevee, but at the cost of significantly slower render times.

Holodeck stores full-size animation frame sources in render-source/ using the same filenames as render/. To regenerate playable animation frames from those preserved sources without opening Blender, run:

holodeck rescale-frames dist --animation-scale-pct 75
holodeck rescale-frames dist --animation-scale-pct 100
holodeck rescale-frames dist --animation-scale-pct 75 --title "My Deck"

The 100 form restores animation frames by copying the preserved source bytes back into render/. Rescaling uses manifest.json to leave first, marker, and last still frames untouched. If --title is supplied, rescale-frames also rewrites the generated player page title; otherwise it leaves the existing player files alone.