If you have been using LionRender and are looking for a viable alternative for your rendering needs, see what RenderStreet can do for you:
Read more about switching from LionRender to RenderStreet.
I’ve been fascinated by Reynante’s work ever since I first saw one of his renders. Each of them tells a story, and I was curious to know how these stories take shape. Read on to find out how Reynante creates his art, about his entrepreneurial side and about what it meant to launch a product in the Blender world: the Cycles Material Vault .
Technology is opening up ways of communication that we couldn’t imagine before. The 360° view gives us control to look over our shoulder and immerse ourselves in the story, and virtual reality offers the next level in delivering the message and making the experience more powerful.
Chris McFall is one of the pioneers who uses Blender to create virtual environments. He now reveals the detailed making-of of the first 360° message for a political party in Wales.
If you have been using Raypump and need an alternative option for your rendering needs, give RenderStreet a try. With high-performance CPU and GPU rendering servers and several pricing options – including a $50 unlimited rendering one – RenderStreet can address all your rendering needs.
Read more about switching from Raypump to RenderStreet and see how we can help accelerate your renders.
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.
At last year’s Blender Conference, a title caught my eye in the schedule: “Automotive design with Blender”. I was intrigued and went to see the track. And this is how I had my first contact with Mathilde – a young and talented artist, who drove the adoption of Blender in Tata Motors’ UK design center. Read on to find out what Blender is used for in the car design department, and what are some of the challenges of a product design pipeline.
Update: see the winners!
It’s been one year since we launched RenderStreet One, our flat fee rendering program, and it was a great experience to see it evolve and attract more and more users. We decided to take a risk when we came up with this program, and we’re glad to see that it paid off and the program provides real value to budget-conscious users.
Contest and prizes: We decided to celebrate RenderStreet One’ anniversary together with the Blender community and have a little get-together in form of a skill contest. The challenge will bring the winner a one-year subscription for (what else?) our all you can render—RenderStreet One—program. For the second and third places, the prizes are 6 months and respectively 3 months of access to RenderStreet One, and we’re also giving a one-month subscription for other 3 mentions. In total, this adds up to 24 months of free rendering for some talented people looking to get the rendering stage out of their mind and out of their homes or offices. And to top that up, The Cycles Material Vault is sponsoring the contest and granting to the 1st place winner a copy of their all-new materials library. How does that sound to you?
I first met Sean a couple of years ago and I remember that I enjoyed listening to him telling stories from the VFX world on the other side of the ocean. He’s a good storyteller too, so pretty quickly he had a captive audience around the table.
The story he is telling today is about his career so far, and I’m really glad he agreed to do it on our blog. If you are working in the VFX industry or are considering a job in this field, read on, I believe you’ll find it interesting.
Sean Kennedy (middle) with Bill Westenhofer, Erik-Jan De Boer, & the visual effects Oscar for “Life of Pi”
“Our bottleneck has always been render power. Now, with RenderStreet One, the only bottleneck is our capacity to research and animate.”
—Marc Chehab
El Contexto
We’re starting our 2016 interview series with Zacharias Reinhardt who has been playing around creating Sci-Fi movies since he was a teenager. Now, at 26, he is a Blender Certified Trainer and, together with his brother Vincent, is the owner of the AgenZasBrothers agency.
As you will learn, Zacharias now puts his efforts mostly into tutoring—doing workshops, Blender video tutorials, in-house training for companies and even remote teaching. He has made more than 180 Blender tutorials which are free on YouTube. But Zach is also into doing his own films, and his project Repto108 is now in the pipeline. Read on for some cool answers from Zach.
Another year has passed, and we’re again drawing the line to sum things up. We worked hard to follow the path we chose for RenderStreet and its mission—to help artists and studios deliver awesome 3D work—to the best of our abilities. We were able to secure the resources and bring to life the second edition of our RenderStreet for Artists program, extending the free rendering for open projects for another year. We launched RenderStreet One, offering a low-cost alternative for the users that need to keep their rendering budget in check.
Image by Joe Mabel via Wikimedia Commons
Also, our effort in finding a way to further help small and medium studios had its first tangible results with the custom studio rendering plan released in the second half of the year. This new service tier proved to be a great enabler to studios that have a Blender pipeline or larger rendering volumes and we’ve got confirmation it’s on the right track. It’s invitation-only at the moment, but if you’re doing volumes of pro work in Blender and need an external rendering resource that won’t burn a hole in your pocket, drop us a line.
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.
Intel booth at CES 2015 —Source: Flickr.com
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.
Read how this year’s #BCon15 went, after the 2014 highlights and the sparkling 2013 moments.
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).
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):
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.
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.
“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
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.
We listened to you and now Blender texture baking is available on our farm (for Cycles and Blender Internal).
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.
