On Monday, Sorin and I arrived in Helsinki, for the Startup Sauna 5 week accelerator program. RenderStreet and other 16 European startups were selected out of 403 applications to be part of the accelerator’s spring batch. We’re delighted to see how Startup Sauna summed up what we do up on the RenderStreet startup page.
Besides the continuous development of the software, Blender community’s performance depends on all individual artists continuously perfecting their skills. Books, video tutorials and courses are constantly providing education materials and are making Blender accessible for more and more people all around the world. Our own records show that last year we rendered jobs from 95 countries. This level of adoption was reached through personal involvement and devotion of the Blender users and trainers.
For 5 years, Andrew Price, running the known BlenderGuru website has been making tutorials, taking interviews, organizing contests, podcasting weekly and being an active Blender evangelist. His course focused on 3D architecture is soon rolling out its second edition. With the help of Anderson Alves Baptist and Reynante Martinez on the furniture modeling side and Rob Garlington keen on plant modeling, they prepared more than 100 new models for this edition of Architecture Academy.
The recent teaser rendered with RenderStreet illustrates how close to perfection 3D may accede:
FMX, the well-known European conference themed on film industry, animation and transmedia has reached its 20th edition. I was in Stuttgart for the entire period – almost a week – and got an interesting insight in what’s trending and the future of the industry.
Mike Pan’s famous test subject, in progress of being rendered
For those who are rendering complex still images, we added a new feature: real time preview of the rendered image on RenderStreet.
Andrei Izrantcev, Developer of V-Ray for Blender
This February V-Ray was officially released for Blender, but the story of the integration started a few years ago. Our guest is Andrei Izrantcev, the man who decided to put together his favorite rendering engine and his passion for open source. What started out as a personal project, managed in his spare time, is now a fully functional part of the V-Ray product line. Now Andrei is a full-time developer at Chaos Group, focused exclusively on V-Ray for Blender.
The story comes from Andrei himself in an interview about the V-Ray for Blender project, telling us how it began and what we can look forward in the months to come.
Since we launched RenderStreet we planned to directly back up the Blender development effort, and at this moment we are in the position to do it. We subscribed to Blender Foundation’s Development Fund in order to help Blender developers keep working on an open source project that relies on the community’s help. The Fund also allows Blender Foundation to collaborate with the best Blender coders out there and make sure the project keeps growing.
The process is very transparent and the Foundation gives constant reports about how the money is spent, what features are being deployed and who is responsible for what. In 2014, three grants have already been awarded:
RenderStreet users by country
Our RenderStreet team is made of analytical, curious minds. One year after we launched RenderStreet, we searched the back end of our service to see where our users come from. The results also imply interesting facts about the actual number of Blender users, but they are only speculative. Anyhow, the map shows also Blender penetration, which represents more than 50% of the world’s countries.
RenderStreet has been up and running for one year. And it’s been an exciting year for us and our busy Blender users. Many projects have run through our render farm since we turned on the servers, and we’re proud to say we’ve fast tracked quite a lot of them.
Fast rendering can be compared to driving a sports car. Once you’ve had it, it’s very hard to go back to the average sedan or minivan. And that feeling is similar to what we’re experiencing in our business. The joy in our work keeps us engaged and there’s no other way than going harder, better, faster, stronger.
As we announced earlier this year, Render Street’s image was in need of a change. Now we’re celebrating Render Street’s 1 year anniversary with a new website design and a re-styled identity. We are happy to share with you, the incredible Blender community, our dear clients and partners: the new render.st
We are happy to announce that, starting now, V-Ray for Blender is available on RenderStreet. We just launched the closed beta stage, and we are working hard on polishing the interface and mopping out the potential bugs.
The on-going effort on integrating V-Ray in Blender – started by Andrei in 2011 and now continued by Chaos Group – made us decide to add it to our service.
If you want to have a sneak peek and be one of the first to have access to our closed beta program, drop us a line. It won’t cost you anything, but feedback and suggestions for improvements will be much appreciated.
Happy Blending!
Using an online render farm should be an easy task. In this article I’m going to explain how to get by the basic tasks and answer some of the most frequently asked questions:
How do I send a project to a farm?
There are several ways to send your project to a farm:
In my view, pricing is one of the important aspects of rendering in a farm (others being the ability to actually deliver the project, the level of support and how easy it is to use them). So let’s see how render farm pricing works.
What is a GHz-hour? What about a core-hour?
You have probably seen some online render farms that are showing a price per GHz-hour or per core-hour for their rendering time. It’s a system that can be confusing for a first-time user. They usually do this because they have servers from several generations of hardware. And with the hardware performance being uneven, they are trying to find a common denominator to build a pricing strategy. The result: these two units — GHz and core-hour — which unfortunately require some effort and attention from users to get the price right.
There are several types of render farms, each of them with their strengths and weaknesses. I’m going to discuss the most accessible ones in a bit of detail.
Render Farm Pro’s and Con’s
Whether you build your own machines for rendering, or you rent computing time from an online render farm, there are costs involved. I will try summarizing the Pro’s and Con’s for each type in the table below:
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Farm type |
Pro’s |
Con’s |
| Distributed or collaborative |
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| DIY |
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Rented computers in the cloud |
|
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Online render farm |
|
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And now let’s discuss each bullet point from the table in detail:
After finding out What is a render farm, this second hands on article will tackle all you need to know to start using one: who is it for, how do you actually work with render farms, where can you find them and what are the costs.
Who uses a farm?
The main users are probably the movie studios (think Hollywood). When rendering a movie would take 16,000 (that’s sixteen thousand) years on a typical home computer and one’s life expectancy is far less than that, in-house rendering is no longer a reasonable choice. After all, they need to deliver those breathtaking special effects to us, right?
As the 3D technology got more accessible and more affordable, different categories of people have started using 3D render farms: production agencies, post-production studios, architects, industrial designers, 3D artists. The majority of users are professionals that make a living out of it, but there is an increasing number of students and hobbyists that are turning to 3D. And this is especially valid for Blender, due to its open nature.
In the past year I had lots of interactions with Blender artists – regardless of whether they are already our customers or not. It’s something I enjoy doing on a personal level, and it is also something that helps us fine-tune our farm to better suit your needs.
During these talks I was sometimes asked about what a render farm is, what it does and how could it help in delivering a project. That’s why I decided to start a mini-series of articles, in which I will try to answer some of these questions.
This first part focuses on the basic questions: the what’s and how’s of render farming.
What is a render farm?
I am turning to Wikipedia for a formal definition of a render farm: “A render farm is high performance computer system, e.g. a computer cluster, built to render computer-generated imagery (CGI), typically for film and television visual effects.”
From the end-user perspective, a render farm is a service that puts a lot of computing power at his disposal, with the purpose of helping him deliver his projects faster.
RenderStreet was launched in Oct 2012 in Closed Beta with this bold announcement on BlenderArtists forum. After the service was tested and refined with the help of this great community, we launched it publicly, in February 2013.
This past year we put all our efforts into making RenderStreet a cutting edge rendering machine, keeping pace with Blender releases, increasing the computational power of the rendering farm and being close to our customers.
Today, we want our brand identity and website design to represent our solution that has turned to be one of the best on this market. RenderStreet must align its looks to its value – The next generation render farm for Blender.
In 2013 we had over 10.000 Blender projects that ran through our farm. They are all private work and most of them were never exposed publicly. But some are out there, on the world wide web. Here is a collection of some cool 3D images rendered with RenderStreet, publicly released by our clients.
The beautiful image Morning at the farmhouse made by Richard Hoatland. Rendered with Cycles, 1500 samples. Took about 1,25 hrs to complete with RenderStreet.
Welcome to 2014!
At RenderStreet we are constantly looking into our performance indicators, as they allow us to monitor our service’s health and performance. And because you are at the center of all our efforts, we wanted to share with you a few of those indicators.
Here are some stats for Blender renders on our farm:
