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Yearly Archives: 2015

Best notebooks for 3D rendering 2015 fall update – Skylake and Geforce 980 Notebook

      Tutorials

At the beginning of this year, I was recommending some of the best laptops for 3D rendering on the market. We’re now close to the end of the year, and in the meantime the hardware has been upgraded with new performance parts. Let’s see what they are, and which notebooks come with the new hardware at this moment.

Intel Skylake CPUs. The 6th generation Core CPU line from Intel has been released and it’s already available in some notebooks from major manufacturers. The CPU that will most likely replace the most popular part in performance notebooks (i7-4720HQ) is the i7-6700HQ. It offers roughly the same performance, but the 14nm process brings a better power profile so it will add a bit to the battery life. Expect to see the 6700HQ as a mainstream CPU in gaming/performance notebooks released starting with this fall.

CES 2015 Intel booth

Intel booth at CES 2015 —Source: Flickr.com

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RenderStreet at Creative Business Cup 2015—Denmark

      News

We’re soon celebrating three years since we launched RenderStreet—starting off bootstrapped, running our first years as a startup, and now shifting gears into a growing business and reaching out to new markets. Our evolution has been noticed by Creative Seeds, the national partner of Creative Business Cup initiative, who invited us to represent Romania at this year’s Creative Business Cup competition.

Visual identity for Creative Business Cup Creative Business Cup is organized by the Center for Cultural and Experience Economy and started as a national competition in Denmark in 2010. In 2012 CBC opened its doors to entrepreneurs from creative industries from around the world.

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Blender conference 2015 – the concise view

      News

The Blender Conference is, as you know, the biggest Blender-related event, and probably the only place where Blenderheads from all over the world come together every year. It’s also the place to learn first-hand about what’s coming next to Blender software and see who did what using Blender—there’s no shortage of ideas there, trust me. And finally, for me it’s also a good place to catch up with friends, and to meet some of the people I’ve only talked to by emails and tweets. Because of that, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Blender Conference 2015 edition

Read how this year’s #BCon15 went, after the 2014 highlights and the sparkling 2013 moments.

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Kaspersky’s One Dollar Lesson, rendered on RenderStreet

      Rendered with RenderStreet

One of the valuable lessons of adult life is that prevention is better than reaction. Because many people seem to ignore the risks of digital attacks, Kaspersky Lab created an online simulator showing how things can go wrong when handling money online.

A while ago, our servers rendered the presentation video for Kaspersky’s One Dollar Lesson website. The project was created by Latvian digital agency Wrong Digital and Gunvaldis Urtans has led the creation team that delivered all graphics and animation. Rendering was the shortest part of the process, with everything ready in a matter of hours. The project was a success and it’s been live for several months, but it is only now that the client has given permission to share the details. 

The making-of video is showcasing the 3D journey’s most important moments and how they managed to educate people about the risks of online payments:

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Render all you can during #bcon15

      Blender, News

Make 3D art. Skip the render time.

We’re celebrating this year’s edition of Blender Conference with a special treat. During 23-25th of October we’ll be giving you access to our all-you-can-render program. Yes, you heard it well. Three days of rendering, for just $1.

We’re rolling this through our RenderStreet One program and you just need to pay one dollar at sign up. After joining, you’re good to go: upload your stuff and enjoy three days of rendering (program terms apply). No hidden costs, no bailout fees.

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Render farm vs. small office/home rendering

      Blender, Tutorials

Professional or hobbyist, every 3D artist hates waiting for the renders to finish. This causes a continuous quest for finding the best solution to render faster and cheaper, which in turn generates countless pages of discussions in the forums, benchmark comparisons, and of course ‘versus’ debates.

I have answered questions on this subject quite a number of times – some of them general, some of them about specific hardware and some of them about our service. My past series of articles offered a bit of background info and some ideas about what to look at when comparing rendering solutions in general. Now, I’ll try to show a more specific use case: rendering at home or in a small office, versus using a professional farm (like RenderStreet).

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3D Cheerios commercial, rendered with RenderStreet

      Blender, Rendered with RenderStreet

We’re thrilled to see how the newest commercial for Cheerios finally turned out. Joel Gerlach and Cobalt Cox, from Studio 229 in LA, created the spot in Blender having to deliver a bold, yet exciting brief: ‘Create Cheeriocraft, Minecraft, but with Cheerios’.

It took the team at Studio 229 only 3 weeks to create the whole world, character, user interface and animation for the 30 seconds commercial. And just a few hours more to complete the rendering on our servers. This is the final cut, which is now screening on TV:

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RenderStreet One: six months after the launch

      Blender


At the beginning of this year we launched a solution dedicated to artists who needed an always-on rendering option without worrying about the added costs: RenderStreet One. Half a year in, and close to 1 million frames rendered into the program, we asked our users how they feel about it.

We decided to share these results with you because they represent an independent confirmation of the way the program delivers. The original questions and the aggregated answers are below (figures have been rounded to the closest mark for an easier read):

1.  How would you appreciate the value for money offered by RenderStreet One?

RenderStreet-One-value-for-money

One of the top priorities in designing this program was to offer a good value for money. We know that there is a continuous struggle in each project between ‘more detail’ and ‘render cost’ and sometimes it’s difficult to balance the two. Even in the case of a commercial project when the client pays for the render time, it’s difficult to factor in all changes and previz versions along the way. So we wanted to offer a tool to make this balancing act a bit easier.

Looking at the feedback from this question, I can say that the program checked this requirement. Roughly 90% of our users (the exact figure is 88.5%) consider it to provide a good or excellent value, which is what we were aiming for.

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How does Blender help in industrial design? Interview with Claas Kuhnen

      Blender, Interviews

ClaasKuhnen-2

Maybe the most challenging aspect of our working lives is bringing new things to life and have people using them. This is particularly true for industrial designers, whose job is to combine functionality with aesthetics, and create things others love.

We’ve had the pleasure of meeting Claas Kuhnen and learn about his recent challenge: addressing functional design in today’s digital times. Besides running his own studio, Claas is also teaching at Wayne State University focusing on 3D design and fabrication technologies. His work was also present at exhibitions like SOFA, SNAG and SIGGRAPH.

Very excited to learn more about product design from an insider, and see some of Claas’ brainy creations.

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Karen Carr: “We rely on RenderStreet for fast, scalable rendering for huge single images, and for animations”

      Blender, Testimonials and user feedback

“You guys are great! We rely on RenderStreet for fast, scalable
rendering for huge single images, and for animations, using Blender
Internal and Cycles. The service is always great, the pricing is fair
and the jobs control panel lets us see in an instant where our projects
are. We like the Blender plug-in, too: we can launch jobs from within
Blender as we work!”

—Karen Carr
Karen Carr Studio

Texture baking in Blender (Cycles and Internal) now supported on RenderStreet

      Blender, News

Over the past months we have received quite a few requests to introduce Blender texture baking on RenderStreet. Texture baking provides a way to store color, lighting and other rendering information in UV maps and save this information on the object. This means that, once the information has been saved, the object can be viewed lighted and textured without a big computational effort. The obvious use cases are real-time systems like games and, of course, more realistic scene previews.

bake-tool-2

We listened to you and now Blender texture baking is available on our farm (for Cycles and Blender Internal).

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3D animation interview: in the mind of Hjalti Hjálmarsson

      Blender, Interviews

Hjalti Hjálmarsson Aside from his charming personality and humor, Hjalti Hjálmarsson is one of the best Blender character animators out there. Last year he joined the Blender Institute team and is currently working on wrapping up Cosmos Laundromat—his most challenging project so far.

I was looking for a chance to pick his brain, ever since we’ve been involved in the Gran Dillama short open movie—he animated it, we did the rendering. The following ten questions discuss the secrets of the animation craft, the benefits of Animation Mentor classes he graduated, and valuable insights on what takes to be a master animator.

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Get featured in our 2015 reel!

      Blender, News

We’re halfway through the year now and, for most of us, the holiday season is knocking on the door. It’s also a good moment to look both back and forward to the things we’ve done in 2015 and to what’s next until the end of this year.

I know that for most of the 3D artists, one of the items that is always on the ‘to-do’ list is the reel. It’s visual art, and the first step in receiving appreciation for one’s work is showing that work to the world – in a reel. As an artist never stops working, each reel gets a life of its own, as it gets updated and evolves in time.

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Guest post: Soup-to-Nuts Cover Art with Free Software

      Tutorials, Guest posts

There are no limits to what you can achieve in Blender. In this next post, you will learn how to design a book cover in 7 guided steps with the author of Blender for Dummies. 

Designers, you now have the tools to kick (some more) ass using free software. Show us your first Blender cover in the comments!

Book front cover

Definitely True, by M. J. Guns

Say you’re approached with a request to produce the artwork and design for the cover of a book. The book’s author says, “I want an image of a pair of disembodied pants running around… and on fire.” That same author, for some reason, also requests that you not not pour gasoline on an actual pair of pants (or the person wearing them) and set it ablaze for a photo shoot. Something about the sanctity of human life or somesuch.

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Mentoring Spherik Accelerator startups

      News

We’re using high performance cloud services around the globe for our render farm and we’re doing this from Romania, a country traditionally associated with count Dracula and the communist regime. Allow us to update that image.

Now, the city of Cluj has been nominated the best city in Europe for air quality and Romania is among the countries with top internet speed. It’s also a software hub for big companies like Adobe, Oracle, and Microsoft. The industry is slowly making way for promising new players—ventures that make it big on the local market, as well as startups that are targeting exits within the large tech companies.

City of Cluj-Napoca

Cluj-Napoca is the European Youth Capital 2015.

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Guest Post: The making-of story of an instant 360º 3D scanner

      Guest posts

What do you do when you dream of something but you don’t have the ready-made tools for building it? You take things in your own hands and build your own tools.

We continue our guest post series with an exciting story, coming from Radu, the man who built up a 3D scanner from scratch.

Kid in scanner

Radu’s kid getting 3D scanned by Tulemod’s built 3D scanner

If you haven’t heard about my city, you certainly heard about Trrransylvania! Well, that’s were Cluj is. Nope, I haven’t met any vampires (yet!) but I surely met lots of IT guys around here. With more than 10.000 people working in tech companies, Cluj is also arguably called the Sillicon Valley of Eastern Europe…  Funny enough, the startup that I am working on right now was born in the real Silicon Valley. More exactly, in Palo Alto.

Tulemod is the typical tech startup, built by technology enthusiasts, trying to change the world by developing a disruptive technology. Our vertical is the fashion industry and we’re working on a solution for digitizing apparel and enabling users to mix and match looks online with the maximum realism. It might seem an utopia but it’s actually a challenging problem that can be solved using a mixture of computer vision, 3D modelling, 3D graphics and enough programming.

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How does ‘double GPU speed’ sound for your renders?

      News

You may have noticed recently that your GPU renders on RenderStreet have been finishing faster. You don’t need to check your samples or resolution, it’s because of a new kind of server we’ve been silently testing in the past week. Besides putting the hardware online for real-world tests, we’ve also run some of the standard benchmarks, and here is the first good news:

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