For me, a true artist is someone who can turn the general everyday into something new and spectacular: taking the subject from a different angle and expressing it differently, or raising an argument that wasn’t there before. In our days, 3D technology allows this approach on almost any subject. Even to things least expected, like hospital trolleys.

This is what Dan Woolley did when assigned with a job to present the newest ward trolley for a medical trade show. He gave this instrument life and transformed it into art. Of course he used some tricks here and there – a creative genesis-like intro, an enticing musical background. But to imagine these things starting from such a sterile brief takes more than mastering Blender, or any other software.

This February, the Blender Institute published a set of files that are used internally by the Cycles developers for testing purposes. They also released the configuration of the workstations they tested these files on, along with the render times for each configuration and scene.

We get asked a lot how fast are our servers, so we thought to give these files a test run and put the numbers here for everyone to see. This way we give you an idea of what kind of rendering speed we are offering, and how our machines perform.