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Monthly Archives: January 2015

Sarah Laufer, la virtuosa de 3D

      Blender, Interviews

The interviews we’ve been hosting on the RenderStreet blog for a while now gave me the opportunity to meet new people and learn a lot from them. With Sarah it was the other way around. I had met her before and even worked together on a project, so I already knew this was going to be a pleasure.

Image of Sarah LauferAfter switching to Blender, Sarah Laufer co-founded Pataz Studio, and specialised in character animation. In 2010 her movie was nominated for the Sundance Film Festival. Then Sarah worked for The Tube open movie. Back in Costa Rica, she was also teaching Blender to kids from poor neighbourhoods in San Jose. Pataz Studio is one of the 12 studios chosen to produce the Gooseberry Project, so now Sarah is based in the Blender Foundation’s Amsterdam HQ. And because she is the first Blender lady we are featuring here, let’s give a warm welcome to Sarita Laufer!

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RenderStreet—rendering figures for 2014

      Blender, Rendered with RenderStreet, News

As 2014 is done with, we drew the line to see what happened, what are the relevant figures for our service and what went different from 2013. We’re sharing them here, as we think we’ve got some interesting results that speak about the work that we’re doing behind the scenes and our stubbornness to surpass our standards.

Here are the RenderStreet stats for 2014:

  • 99.89% uptime. This means 9 hours downtime in the entire year. It’s two hours more than last year, because of platform migrations we had to implement.
  • Over 15,000 jobs, with a 99% success rate in job delivery. Only 1% of the jobs had issues that prevented them from being successfully finished. And, as you might have experienced, we make every effort to deliver. This is an improvement over the next year, and one we’re proud of, especially considering the increased rendering volume.
  • 85% of the animations were delivered in under 71 minutes in average. A good figure, showing constant performance over the year.
  • Highest acceleration, compared to the client’s machine: 533x, or 1.5 hours compared to over 1 month (the comparison base was a 2012 iMac).
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RenderStreet ONE is now open for registrations

      Blender, News

3d graphcis

We’ve been trying to understand how different users do their work, in order to come with better solutions for their rendering needs. One common feedback suggested that it would be nice to be able to render the project several times while in development, without any added rendering costs. So we started thinking about how this could be done and came up with a plan.

RenderStreet ONE, our newest all-you-can-render, flat fee tier, is now open for registrations. The program is designed for people who have constant rendering needs and want an always-on resource they can offload their work to. This will ensure close, precise, control of the results, making the 3D renders more available throughout the process.

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Customer story: “The best solution that I’ve found for my Blender rendering needs”

      Testimonials and user feedback

“I first used RenderStreet with a project that I knew I would have to outsource to a farm for. We reached out early on to see if the services that RenderStreet provided would mesh with our workflow. Not only did RenderStreet offer the services that we needed, but their staff made the whole process extremely approachable. There were moments when I had issues with my renders (problems that stemmed from my own inexperience), and RenderStreet reached out to me with answers to my problems before I had a chance to check them myself.

The workflow provided by RenderStreet is ideal; it is literally a one click process for me to get my render started on their servers. If I have a more complex setup, or if I have any questions regarding the process, I know that I would be able to contact them with my concerns, and they would respond in a timely manner with a well formed response to my comments.

RenderStreet offers the best solution that I’ve found for my Blender rendering needs. I look forward to working with them in the future.”

—Kyler Alford

Best notebooks for 3D rendering. Part 2: Recommended configurations

      Blender, Tutorials

In the first part of this series I talk about the technical considerations for buying a new laptop for 3D work / rendering. I also tracked down the two NVidia mobile cards from the latest generation that are in the performance area. If you want to see how GeForce GTX 970M and 980M tested out in Cycles, you can see the figures here—their rendering performance is quite impressive.

Next, I’m going to make a few recommendations for specific notebook models, which I consider suited for particular usage patterns. Let’s get started.

The road warrior. If you are spending a lot of time on the road and need a light but powerful notebook, this one’s for you.

High-end configuration 15″: Clevo P650SG/P651SG (Sager NP8652)

Sager Notebook official image

Sager NP8652 official image and source

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Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M and GTX 980M performance in Blender

      Blender, Tutorials

In the first article from the notebook review series I am recommending two NVidia cards: the GTX 970M and GTX 980M. They are the top two performers from NVidia at this moment, and they are most likely to successfully keep up the pace a few years from now.

When doing my research, I tried to find some benchmarks to show Blender’s rendering performance. I wasn’t able to find any data, so I turned to the online community for help. I knew that in the notebook community there are users with vast knowledge on the subject, and with access to the newest hardware. I found the reviews made by HTWingNut from the notebookreview forum very thorough and informative over the time, so I approached him with my request.

GeForce GTX 970M and 980M rendering performance in Blender Cycles. Figures courtesy of HTWingNut.

GeForce GTX 970M and 980M rendering performance in Blender Cycles. Figures courtesy of HTWingNut.

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