Today we’ll look at lighting related settings. Since it’s a larger subject, we’ll have only the first part this week.
It is one of the 3d realm laws that rendering times will usually go up as our lighting scheme becomes more realistic and subtle and diffuse. We’ll take a look at a couple of settings that increase render quality in subtle ways and render time in a big way.
Blender 2.66 has been in the making for some time, and it brings a lot of new features, some of them expected for a long time. Read the official release log for more information on what is new.
We always strive to bring support for the latest Blender releases on RenderStreet. And when building a new version is very easy and straight forward, we add support as soon as it is released by the Blender Foundation.
In the case on 2.66, we managed to build it quick enough, so I am proud to announce that RenderStreet supports Blender 2.66 as of today. That’s only 5 hours after the official release. And I bet we are the first render farm to support blender 2.66.
All of us at RenderStreet are very aware that render times are a big factor in choosing a render farm. After all, it all scenes would render in seconds, you would render them on your own machine every time and would have no need for a render farm. So we’re kicking off a series of articles dedicated to optimizing your render times.
Today we’ll take a look at geometry related factors that can make the render time go overboard. These are not dependent on the render engine.
We’ve spent a lot of time working on getting all physics to work flawlessly on our farm. The result is that almost every type of bake is supported and can be baked on our farm. There is one notable exception caused by a bug in Blender, as noted at the end of this article.
At this time, we only support baking files on our farm, due to the length of time it takes sometimes to upload the bake files. We are looking into adding support for bake uploads, but it’s going to take a while, as we’ll have to add support for FTP uploads first.
Update 2015: It is now possible to upload your own bake cache and use it to render your files on our farm. For more info on how to do this please see our knowledge base.
We’ve worked on RenderStreet for a long time – since January 2012. During this time, we’ve learned a lot, especially about Blender and how to interact with it. It’s has been an interesting time and a great start from RenderStreet.
After 13 months in development and closed beta, we have officially opened up for the public on February 6th. Now everybody can use the site and enjoy fast rendering for their projects. We are considering the service still in beta though, but it’s open beta now and the chances of bugs being encountered are very small now.
