It’s here. The long awaited Blender 2.67, with it’s support for SSS and FreeStyle has been released a couple days ago by the Blender Foundation. As usual, we added support for it just a day after it has been released, so you can enjoy this stable release of Blender.
We have also moved all projects that were using the latest SVN version of blender to use the stable 2.67 instead and removed the support for that SVN version.
When we built the first version of RenderStreet, we started with the idea that we can take advantage of Blender’s pack external data feature and make sure the files are uploaded properly, with all the data needed to render them.
As they say, no plan survives the contact with the customer, so a while after we launched we ran into issues with Blender features not supported by the pack operation. Some of them, like the external libraries, were fixed by the dev team. Others, like the font embedding, had workarounds. But it became obvious that sooner or later we will run into something that can’t be supported at all.
There’s an interview with me on the BlenderNetwork site. You can check it out on their site:
http://www.blendernetwork.org/blog/interview-render-street
FreeStyle has been available for Blender for some time, but it required a separate build of Blender. That made it difficult to support it on our farm. With the inclusion in the main development trunk with 2.67, FreeStyle will make it into the official release of Blender, so we can support it at RenderStreet as well. Hello cartoon face 
I am proud to announce that we have recently acquired the blenderrenders.com website. This marks a new step in our expansion, and brings on board the oldest Blender dedicated render farm. Since RenderStreet already offers all the features included on BlenderRenders, we decided to invite all the users from the acquired site to join our farm, and give them an extended signup bonus, to facilitate the transition.
Full press release after the break
We added support for rendering your Blender projects with LuxRender on RenderStreet some time ago. That was all fine and we were able to serve our customers who used both Blender and Luxrender. Though the problem remained that not all people using LuxRender build their projects with Blender. We’be been working for some time on this and the fruits of that work can be seen as of this week.
OSL has been supported in Blender for some time, and we have been working on adding it to RenderStreet as well. It should have been supported some time ago, but we ran into issues building the support for the OSL compiler on our platform. So , because of that, it has been delayed for a while.
One place we should definitely not skip when trying to improve our render time is the Performance panel in Render tab.
Rendering to tiles makes better use of the processor power. In the newest Blender version, the numbers in the tiles section means their size in pixels, but understanding which size works best is a bit baffling. Tests showed that GPUs work best with 256 x 256 tiles while CPU makes best use of the 64 x 64 tile size (regardless of whether we are talking about BI or Cycles on CPU).
It’s been a long waited feature for Blender, and finally SSS is here. That’s Sub-Surface Scattering for those of you not familiar with the acronym. It means that the light penetrates the object surface and reflects / refracts in the depth of the object, not only on the surface.
What does it mean to have support for this? At least more realistic skin, but generally speaking better and more realistic materials for your renders.
Right before pressing the render button, selecting the right resolution for our image can be a puzzling decision, as size most directly relates to render time. However, it is not a linear relation. An increase of 200% in the resolution panel actually means four times the pixel number. Depending on the specifics of the scene, this can lead to an increase in render time from two to five times or even more.
