As more and more freelancers are taking on the RenderStreet One monthly plan for professional work, we have been receiving requests to add support for Multilayer EXR output for this plan. This was necessary for artists that have a pipeline built around this format or those who were using external compositing tools that needed the Cryptomatte data available, and we wanted to accommodate the request.
We have just released an all-new version of the Blender render submission plug-in for our farm. The update brings significant changes in the project asset collection feature, plus other features you have asked for:
We have been supporting render groups and passes for Modo on RenderStreet for a while now. So far, the system only allowed selecting a single group and either a single pass or all passes for rendering in a job.
As you have requested an upgrade for this feature, we obliged and implemented it.
2020 is the year for the big releases on RenderStreet. Our new interface has been officially launched in April, and at the time I was promising more upgrades soon.
It’s now time to talk about the next one, which brings faster transfers and faster file processing for your renders. More specifically, this is about upgrades to our infrastructure, for both our core and our auxiliary (file management) services. Your file uploads and downloads will be faster, your movie previews and thumbnails will be generated more rapidly, the archives will be ready for download in a shorter time and the uploads to your cloud accounts will also be faster.
This is quite a large project (and also a critical one), as it involves code, hardware and networking changes. This means it took time to plan it, develop it and implement it. We are currently in the second phase of its release, and everything works as planned. As of now, two new features are officially available:
“Limitless worlds at the power of my fingertips, it’s a beautiful feeling.”
Today’s interview has Brennan Karem as storyteller. Experienced VFX artist and also a director of both camera and animation work, Brennan tells a very entertaining story about his latest short, “Fatherhood”. It’s a story about effort, determination and also personal achievement. This has been one of my favorite interviews so far, and I’m sure you’ll find it interesting on more than one level.
Marius: You created this short for the “Stay at home” challenge from Film Riot. How did you decide to participate?
Brennan: I’ve been following Film Riot for years. Actually, I found them pretty much when they first started. They frequently hold online film festivals/contests and I’ve always wanted to participate but have never had the chance. Whether it was work or personal life, I just haven’t ever had the time before.
Official music video for Sonic Boom’s “Things Like This (A Little Bit Deeper)” . Created by James Siewert, rendered with RenderStreet One.
Enjoy!
Update 2023-01: The AgX profile is now available as well for rendering your projects.
We have just added support for multiple color profiles in Blender on our farm. If you needed to use a non-default profile for your project, now you can render it on RenderStreet with the same settings.
The profiles supported at this moment, in addition to the default one, are:
The new profiles are available with Blender 2.82a and newer, and can only be accessed in our new render management interface.
Happy rendering!
We have been working for a while now on reinventing our job management interface. You are spending a fair amount of time using it, and making things easier for you is one of our top priorities. So we started a new project, that resulted in a totally redesigned interface, created from scratch. The project has reached the RC phase now, and I’m excited to share it with you!
The main goal of the new interface is to help you be more productive. We analyzed the way you are using our service, and based on the data, we put emphasis on certain areas and made some functionality easier to access. Plus, there are a number of extra features that will help you focus on what is important: creating and delivering projects. And of course, the new interface adapts to the device you are using, from a phone to a large desktop screen.
At the beginning of 2019, we were announcing an upgrade in our GPU line-up. The new GPUs at the time (Nvidia® Tesla K80) came with almost double speed compared to the old ones, and three times more memory.
Now it’s time for a new upgrade. We are jumping forward three hardware architecture generations, from Kepler to Volta, and we’re powering new machines with Nvidia® V100 Tensor Core GPUs. The new GPUs are, as described by Nvidia, “The Most Advanced Data Center GPU Ever Built” and bring even more speed and 16 GB of RAM for your renders. As with the previous upgrade, there is no increase in the price you are paying for our services – this is a free performance upgrade. The new machines are live at this moment (in fact, they have been live for a while now, introduced gradually in production). And we’ve run the numbers for you, to see exactly how much better they are.
We’ve been working for a while now on the technology layer on which RenderStreet is based. A lot of internal components have been upgraded, and others are in the process of being upgraded and will be released in the near future.
The Blender add-on has already received a significant upgrade. While the basic functionality has remained the same (a future update will add new features), the new version has a couple of advantages over the old one.
It’s the beginning of a new decade, and the numerologists are probably busy all over the world drawing hidden meanings from the 2020 number. In the meantime, in our office, part of the job is analyzing last year’s activity in order to build a better version of ourselves for the year to come.
2019 was the 5-year anniversary of our monthly plan RenderStreet One. With over 37 million frames rendered so far for artists, studios and students around the world, I’m glad to see that our efforts paid off and we were able to maintain a low-cost, dependable rendering solution for the Blender and Modo communities. It’s an option that makes rendering affordable for a lot of people that wouldn’t be able to use a render farm otherwise. And it accomplishes this without having to compromise: your projects don’t leave our infrastructure, everything remains fully private and confidential, and the plan is backed up by our tech support. Having a good rendering solution is important for an artist because it can go a long way to help improve their artistic and personal development. And this is, in fact, our end goal. So this one is a clear ‘win’ for everybody 🙂
