RenderStreet was among the selected startups for EIT ICT Labs‘ innovation program. An initiative supported by TechPeaks and Startup Pirates, EIT ICT Labs has selected 8 startups from Europe for a one-week program of coaching and mentoring. So, for the entire last week I have been in the beautiful city of Trento, in Northern Italy.
A BMW retailer in Switzerland is promoting the new X5 with a TV spot created entirely with Blender. As it usually happens in advertising, short deadlines demand fast production. This is how RenderStreet was entrusted with rendering a significant part of the animation.
Blend Swap is an initiative to open collaboration that grew to become the biggest library of 3D assets made with Blender, at free disposal for personal and commercial use. Launched in 2009, the site gathered a community of more than 48k registered users fostered by founder Matthew Muldoon.
A great event may be measured by the ideas and projects it generates. For us, Blender Conference was the place where we came up with a way to help Blender community develop.
We are officially launching the RenderStreet for Artists sponsorship program in which we will provide selected projects with free rendering on our servers.
The only requirement for applicants is that their project is open and all the resources are made available for anyone to use. It may be an animation film, a 3D image, whatever you decide to work on that needs fast rendering.
On 20-21st of November, all the tech scene of Central and Eastern Europe was in Bucharest, attending How to Web event, organized by Bogdan Iordache and his team. RenderStreet was selected, among other 32 finalists, to take part in the Startup Spotlight competition, a valuable experience taking us closer to the next stages of our business.
How to Web is dedicated to the online tech industry, with keynotes from company CEOs, investors, serial entrepreneurs, start-up accelerator officials, designers, web journalists and we’ve never missed any edition, since 2009.
Besides running a serious business, we love watching well animated cartoons. And when Blender Institute released the first episode of Caminandes, we knew we wanted to back them up.
We allocated 50 some pro-bono servers and we gave Pablo Vazquez and his team our full support for rendering the next llama adventures. For the last month, our servers have been busy with Cycle rendering Caminandes Grand Dillama scenes. Amazingly, one day after the upload, it got over 20k views on YouTube:
Even if our service is up and running for almost a full year now, business wise, we are constantly looking for development opportunities and exploring strategies to enrich RenderStreet on all levels. This small intro is meant to prepare some good news: RenderStreet is a finalist in the Startup Spotlight competition, part of the How to Web event.
We just got back from the Blender Conference in Amsterdam. It was an impressive show, with lots of engaging presentations and many talks you could learn from. The overall atmosphere was very close to the Blender spirit: open source style, a bit chaotic, but kept on track and delivering good content.
Marius Iatan and Sorin Vinatoru, founders of RenderStreet, among other participants at the Blender Conference. Cheers guys!
As winner of the Romanian Best Cloud Startup award, RenderStreet participated in the European contest for the Best European Cloud Startup organised at the EuroCloud Congress and was a runner-up for the title.
With over 300 industry and government experts from 23 EU states and around the world, the EuroCloud Congress is the place to be for learning about new developments in the cloud industry.
RenderStreet was finalist for Best Cloud Services Startup at the EuroCloud Congress 2013. Image source
Our Blender plugin is now available for all platforms. This means you can use it in Windows, MacOSX and Linux, with Blender 2.67 or newer. After installing it, you will be able to send renders to our farm and check their status, all from Blender’s interface. The plugin handles the file upload to our farm in a secure way, and launches the render automatically. It also displays a list of your recent jobs, and you can click in the list to open the job page and download the files.
Blender 2.69 RC1 has been put up by the Foundation about 3 days ago, so we started working on having it available on our farm as well. This didn’t take long and the new version is available on our farm right now.
Please note that this is a release candidate, so it might contain bugs. Use it on your own risk, and for testing purposes only.
Both Sorin and Marius will be in Amsterdam between October 24th and October 29th, attending the Blender conference there. Marius will also take part in the panel about commercializing, where he will present our challenges and accomplishments in working with Blender in a commercial environment.
If you happen to be at the conference this year, send us an email, or leave a comment below. We’ll love to meet you in person and have a chat.
It’s been more than 6 months since we launched our live service and things are going well. We rendered a lot of jobs in the past 6 months, and at this point we need to introduce a file and job retention policy, so we do not store your files on our servers longer than needed.
To this extent, we have elaborated the following retention policy. We will keep the jobs and files for a set amount of time, depending on the membership level.
Since launch, we have collected feedback from you regarding the job management interface. We have slightly refined the interface in time, based on this feedback. But one of the major pain points was the inability to tweak the project parameters without uploading the file again. And sometimes these files can get very large. We listened to the feedback and I am happy to announce a major update to the job submission interface.
I am happy to announce that BlenderGuru’s new course intro materials have been rendered on RenderStreet. It was my pleasure to welcome Andrew among our customers and see the awesome renders he created for his course.
Below are a couple of images reproduced with permission from Architecture Academy’s website. More pictures here, check it out for more goodies rendered on RenderStreet.
The Architecture Academy registration will be open until 17th July 4PM GMT, so hurry up and grab your seat.
Blender 2.68 RC1 has been released by the Blender Foundation a couple weeks ago. We have finally managed to add that to our farm, so you can send your projects using this version as well. It took us a bit of time to add it because it uses a different CUDA version and we ran into compatibility issues with it. All that was fixed in the end and I am happy to have this live.
The most expected feature in this release is the ability to render cycles hair on GPU. So the projects that use hair will no longer have to be rendered on CPU machines, and will be able to benefit from the GPU speedup.
To illustrate the GPU speedup, I took BlenderGuru’s Sintel file and rendered the same image with 2.67b and 2.68 RC1. 2.67b (image on the left) was rendered on CPU, 2.68 RC1 (on the right) was rendered on GPU. The times look like this:
A second test we did involves only hair (see image below). Here are the times for it:
My conclusion is that, even though it’s faster to render the hair on GPU, the gain in performance is not as much as expected. This might be because we have very powerful CPU servers. Likely the gain on a lower power desktop computer will be higher than this.
Have you rendered anything interesting with 2.68? Post it in the comments.
This just came in, a nice sports car created by Mariusz of www.mac300.pl .
Have you rendered anything interesting? Let us know in the comments and we might feature it.
This story was originally published in the Blender Art Magazine issue #41. You can read it in the magazine, and we are reproducing it here for your convenience.
In this article, I am going to write about the story of RenderStreet, the next generation render farm dedicated to rendering Blender projects. I will touch on the topics of how we came up with the idea, what was like building it and how it turned out in the current stage.
Just a quick note to let you know that we have updated the blender 2.67 version we have on the site to the latest released by the Foundation. So the current version is now 2.67b. This ads a number of fixes over the 2.67a version and should increase the stability of the renders done with it.
Rendering anything interesting with 2.67? Let me know in the comments.
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.
