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Monthly Archives: July 2014

Sebastian König, on his Blender tutoring passion

      Blender, Interviews

We recently started the RenderStreet interviews section on our blog, setting out to find unique stories inside the Blender community. Many already know Sebastian König from his work at Blender Foundation’s Tears of Steel open movie and his Blender training activities. He is one of the first Blender Foundation Certified Trainers (BFTC) in Germany, with a solid experience in teaching Blender.

I wanted to know more about what’s it like to teach Blender, and find the secret to becoming a well recognised expert. Besides his practical advice and insights, Sebastian’s authenticity and openness show he’s a man with a true calling for his work.

Marius Iatan: You have a long experience Image of Sebastian König both with online tutorials and live training all over the world. What was the most inspiring training you did, and why?

Sebastian König: I would say personal training is always the most inspiring. Online training or DVDs are great to reach a lot of people, but recording tutorials can be, at least for me, rather tedious. When doing recordings it’s just too tempting to try to fix mistakes and do another take. I often find myself recording the same sentence over and over again until I get it “right”. Mostly that doesn’t even improve the first take.

That’s also why I enjoy personal teaching so much. It’s all live and it doesn’t matter if everything is perfectly pronounced, or if you do a mistake now and then. Live training has this special something. It’s exciting and that usually makes my brain work faster. Which then results in better training. :)

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Cycles versions speed comparison. CPU and GPU

      Blender, News

Blender’s fast-paced release cycle is a unique differentiator in the 3D modeling world. Its purpose is to come up with new features, updates and bug fixes fast. Among the trade-offs stands a continuous learning process and the fact that there are bugs that need to be fixed. But this is part of Blender’s charm, and I think it’s well worth it.

During the last few releases, the ‘Cycles improvements’ section in the release notes has been constantly populated. And almost all recent releases come with the promise of speed improvement.

At RenderStreet, we probably have the widest array of Blender versions available for rendering from all render farms (2.63 and upwards). So we put on our scientist lab coats in an attempt to test them out, see how they perform on server-grade hardware and identify the best version available for our users. The model of choice was the Pabellon Barcelona Cycles scene that Hamza Cheggour published on his eMirage site. This file is on its way to replace the famous BMW as the ‘standard’ benchmark for Cycles, so we decided to use it for this purpose.

The tests started with a̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶r̶  Blender 2.66 and went through the newest version, Blender 2.71. Server configurations used were 2 x Tesla M2090 for GPU, and 2 x Xeon E5-2670 for CPU. RenderStreet render times for Blender Cycles are revealed in the chart below:

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