“[..]you don’t have to do everything on your own, you need to have a team and trust your team, have a process in which everybody collaborates. But if you are starting out and nobody helps you, you need to have willpower and find a way to tell your story, there’s always a way.” – Edgar Romero Pérez
Thank you! The monthly plan suits my wallet a LOT better than RebusFarm which was really breaking the bank.
James Siewert
Cinematographer and Visual Effects Artist, Glass Eye Pix
As Blender 2.80 development advances toward the first Release Candidate, Eevee becomes more stable and receives more features. With Blender Internal out of the picture and the promise of greatly improved speed, Eevee generates a lot of excitement – and a corresponding amount of questions. The most important two are, of course, “how fast is it?” and “how does the output quality compare to Cycles?”
We decided to run a few tests on our farm and see what the results will tell us. We picked three different scenes that have both Cycles and Eevee versions and rendered them on our servers. The resulted images are not identical, as lighting works differently in the two engines. They are close enough to be relevant for the purpose of this test, though, and they should give you a better insight into Eevee’s capabilities.
2018 has been a full year, with a lot of work, and a lot of satisfaction, too. The farm has been running 24/7 from the first second of January until the last one in December, rendering your work. As usual, we’ve gathered some facts and numbers and we’re sharing them with you. As you’re trusting us with your projects, we want to give you a bit of insight into what it takes to always be ready to render.
We have been looking for a render farm that can provide us with what we need- fast, high quality renders. It has taken us a while to find one, and after meeting you guys, and testing out your great business, we want to thank you for supplying us with such a fantastic rendering studio. Keep up the great work, and we look forward to using you for a long time.
Devon Krish
BDS
When it comes to rendering, there’s really no such thing as ‘too fast’. I know every artist has a secret desire to put as much eye-candy as possible in their projects, so we’re working hard on providing you with the tools to accomplish that. As part of this process, we are performing periodical upgrades to our infrastructure, to give you constant access to faster, better hardware.
We upgraded our GPUs offering three years ago, and at that time the upgrade doubled the speed. We are doing it now again, to almost the same effect. This means the GPUs that are rendering your jobs now are about twice as fast as the old ones, and four times as fast compared to the ones we put at your disposal just 4 years ago.
We always strive to offer complete support for all the functionality of the 3D packages we support on our render farm. So we upgraded our systems to include the new features added by the latest release of Modo – the NVIDIA® OptiX™ denoiser (introduced in Modo version 12.2). The denoiser is GPU-based and, on our infrastructure, it runs on specially-configured servers that are also equipped with high-performance dual Xeon E5-series CPUs.
You can see below some tests made with the denoiser in a simple scene from Modo’s samples. There were three renders: one with the default quality settings of the scene, one with low-quality settings and the third with the same low-quality settings, plus the denoise step. All the renders were made at 2220 x 1440 px.
Eevee is the new PBR engine introduced with the major 2.80 release of Blender as a fast rendering tool for 3D artists. Created as a real-time engine, it opens up new possibilities for your projects – both when used independently and when used in combination with Cycles.
Starting now, Eevee rendering
Happy blending!
Image “Ember Forest” created by Mike Pan
RenderStreet just works. I typically work with bleeding edge tools and software, and there are always compromises in terms of ease of use. In this regard, RenderStreet was a breath of fresh air. Within minutes of signing up, I was generating high detail renders. I was continually surprised by neat little features such as real-time video previews and compressed downloads which made my life so much easier. Coupled with amazing, proactive support, I’d have no hesitation in recommending RenderStreet to anyone. Thanks so much!
Phil Sullivan,
The Pulse
Update January 2019: One year after the initial post, we ran the battery of tests again, using the latest Beta version of Blender 2.80 and the official 2.79b release. The visual quality has improved significantly and now the 2.80 renders look very close to the 2.79 ones. As we have upgraded our infrastructure, we added the new GPUs to the mix as well. Read below for the charts and our comments.
The upcoming major release of Blender – version 2.80 – has a lot of buzz surrounding it. And for good reason, too. There’s the brand new Eevee engine, showing a lot of promise. And there is a truckload of new features – new grease pencil, workspaces concept, layers and collections, and many others. On the performance side, there are also significant improvements, and a notable addition is the new hybrid render mode. This allows rendering using both the CPU(s) and the GPU(s) from the same machine, promising speed improvements in all Cycles renders.
The hybrid rendering mode is indeed an interesting feature. It has been present in V-Ray for a while with good results. So, naturally, we were excited to see it come in Blender for Cycles, too. Because it so happens that there are a large number of GPU machines in our backyard, that also have pretty powerful CPUs, we decided to put the new feature to the test.
It’s the beginning of a new year and, as it’s our tradition by now, we’re sharing with you some of the behind-the-scenes activity from our farm. So, if you’re curious to learn how and what we did last year, read on.
If you’ve been using (or just following) us for a while, you know by now that we’re continuously improving our service and 2017 was no exception. We’ve rolled out a number of new features, both visible and invisible, sharing the same goal: to make your life easier. The ones that I’d add to a quick highlight list are: adding Modo support, unifying the payment system, adding upgrades to the monthly plan RenderStreet One and adding cloud operations for upload and download. And just a couple of weeks ago, in December, we released a network optimization upgrade for RenderStreet One for easier management of large assets. The effects have been very positive: the transfer time for large projects has been cut by up to 60% in some cases. This means more rendering power available to you!
Moving on to the numbers, here are the most relevant facts for our activity:
For a lot of Blender people (myself included), the end of October is a time of joy. This is when the annual Blender Conference takes place, in Amsterdam. It’s that moment of the year when friends meet again, to learn about the new things that happened in the Blender world and to hang out together in the evenings.
This year was no exception. The 3-day weekend started on Friday as usual in downtown Amsterdam at De Balie with a keynote from Ton Roosendaal. Then Daniel Lara talked about the new Hero movie, created with the new Grease Pencil feature in Blender 2.8.
We have just released an update to the RenderStreet One subscription payment module. The new version adds the possibility to subscribe using Paypal and AMEX – two features you have been asking for.
With a German precision, the International Conference on Animation, Effects, VR, Games and Transmedia (or FMX, in short) happens every year when the spring is considering a comeback to Stuttgart. I’ve attended the past 4 editions and this is my favourite moment of the year to get updated on what studios and software publishers in the industry are doing. Plus, there’s a lot of eye candy, too – a lot of the latest blockbusters have their VFX broken down and explained by the studios that worked on them.
The reason for which I decided to write about this edition – after last writing about the 2014 one – was that this year, the industry seems to be finally committed to a few important directions:
Today we are proudly launching our new website and we’re very excited about the changes that are rolled out in this new version. It’s the most important release since our service has been launched and it’s something that all of you will benefit from. Read on for more details:
We followed the discussion around the new Filmic OCIO configuration, we’ve seen the samples and we understand what difference it can make in a project. So we added a special build of Blender 2.78a with support for it on our farm. To use it, simply select it from the supported build list when you launch a job from our interface.
Happy Blending!
Update 06 February 2017: Microsoft OneDrive has been added to the list of supported cloud services.
We are aware that many artists and teams are using online storage accounts for their projects. It’s an easy way to work together on the same files and it also has the advantage of being able to access the project from any location.
At the same time, we are aware of the fact that internet connections are not always the fastest thing on the planet. And if your project is already online, it would be a nice shortcut to have it downloaded to our render farm directly from there. So we added support for Dropbox and Google Drive, right in our interface.
It’s been four years since our official launch, almost a lifetime in ‘technology years’. We have come a long way in understanding you and your needs and in developing our tech to suit these particular needs. We have grown into a mature, established company now and we are changing our looks to match this reality.
Today we are releasing the new theme for our blog, which is also a preview of what is to come for our public site. Enjoy – and keep close for the main site update.
We’re a couple of weeks into 2017 now, and it’s time for our yearly retrospective. As we are doing every year, we’re looking back to see what we have accomplished, and we’re hinting some of the things to come in the current year. You’re walking the path with us, so we’re sharing the experiences.
2016 has been a year defined by growth and focus for RenderStreet. Those two simple words have brought a number of interesting challenges, which were the driver for a sustained technology push. As a result, we have become even more flexible in addressing your needs and more efficient at the same time. This means we are now very well equipped to handle everything you can throw at us, including those awesome 360/VR images and videos you will be making this year.
Let’s see what this meant in numbers for 2016:
Rendering at home or on the office workstation is how most of us start in our careers. It’s the obvious solution for an easy start and it continues to represent a viable option for every artist during their evolution. And because of these very reasons, most people don’t ever consider the costs associated with it.
