“My overnight 12 hour laptop render for a client meeting was once ruined half an hour before it was needed. Popped into www.render.st and uploaded the file. 15 minutes later my render came in with an email. Client loved it. Boss loved it. I have been using it ever since!.
RenderStreet has saved my back more than once! I totally owe those guys!”
—Ejnar Brendsdal
www.ejnaren.com
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.
The Weekly CG Challenge organized by AgenZasBrothers
AgenZasBrothers’ Weekly CG Challenge is a contest that has been picking up momentum due to its open nature—there are no restrictions regarding the software you use for the art—and the interesting themes. It’s a great way to test your skills, build up a portfolio, and hopefully enter the hall of fame. Besides, there are some cool prizes at stake!
For the next weeks, we’ll be supporting the Weekly CG Challenge contest and award the winner with a one-month subscription for RenderStret One —our all-you-can render program for Blender. There are other prizes too, so be sure to check out the contest page.
The Camindandes Llamigos renders have finally been finished and now the moment we’ve all been waiting for is here! The third Caminandes open movie made by The Blender Institute (and the second one rendered with RenderStreet) has been released.
We’re soon celebrating three years since we launched RenderStreet—starting off bootstrapped, running our first years as a startup, and now shifting gears into a growing business and reaching out to new markets. Our evolution has been noticed by Creative Seeds, the national partner of Creative Business Cup initiative, who invited us to represent Romania at this year’s Creative Business Cup competition.
Creative Business Cup is organized by the Center for Cultural and Experience Economy and started as a national competition in Denmark in 2010. In 2012 CBC opened its doors to entrepreneurs from creative industries from around the world.
One of the valuable lessons of adult life is that prevention is better than reaction. Because many people seem to ignore the risks of digital attacks, Kaspersky Lab created an online simulator showing how things can go wrong when handling money online.
A while ago, our servers rendered the presentation video for Kaspersky’s One Dollar Lesson website. The project was created by Latvian digital agency Wrong Digital and Gunvaldis Urtans has led the creation team that delivered all graphics and animation. Rendering was the shortest part of the process, with everything ready in a matter of hours. The project was a success and it’s been live for several months, but it is only now that the client has given permission to share the details.
The making-of video is showcasing the 3D journey’s most important moments and how they managed to educate people about the risks of online payments:
We’re celebrating this year’s edition of Blender Conference with a special treat. During 23-25th of October we’ll be giving you access to our all-you-can-render program. Yes, you heard it well. Three days of rendering, for just $1.
We’re rolling this through our RenderStreet One program and you just need to pay one dollar at sign up. After joining, you’re good to go: upload your stuff and enjoy three days of rendering (program terms apply). No hidden costs, no bailout fees.
We’re thrilled to see how the newest commercial for Cheerios finally turned out. Joel Gerlach and Cobalt Cox, from Studio 229 in LA, created the spot in Blender having to deliver a bold, yet exciting brief: ‘Create Cheeriocraft, Minecraft, but with Cheerios’.
It took the team at Studio 229 only 3 weeks to create the whole world, character, user interface and animation for the 30 seconds commercial. And just a few hours more to complete the rendering on our servers. This is the final cut, which is now screening on TV:
Open movies have a huge impact for the people in the community: they help improve both the software tools and the personal skills of the artists. Helping to render these movies for free is our way of backing the open source movement and also the Blender community. A new edition of RenderStreet for Artists, our sponsorship program for open movies, just started to roll.
We’re using high performance cloud services around the globe for our render farm and we’re doing this from Romania, a country traditionally associated with count Dracula and the communist regime. Allow us to update that image.
Now, the city of Cluj has been nominated the best city in Europe for air quality and Romania is among the countries with top internet speed. It’s also a software hub for big companies like Adobe, Oracle, and Microsoft. The industry is slowly making way for promising new players—ventures that make it big on the local market, as well as startups that are targeting exits within the large tech companies.
Cluj-Napoca is the European Youth Capital 2015.
There are just a few more days left in this year—time to turn the page and set the grounds for 2015. To do that, we passed in review some of the best works rendered on RenderStreet this year, showcasing some of our clients to the world.
The demo reel features 3D animations that were made by some of the greatest artists and animation studios using Blender. From realistic buildings and architecture design, to cartoons and commercials, the selection pictures a wide scope of 3D renders.
We finished rendering another Blender animation short, just in time for submitance to this year’s Suzanne Awards. The Butterfly Effect was part of our RenderStreet for Artists Program, that provided independent artists with free rendering, on our servers.
Creator of the movie, Patrice Bertrand explains the coming of the story, as well as the technical lessons he learned from this exercise.
The Blender community in Romania is quite small, but there are a few talented people we want to meet and get to know better. So we’re inviting the local 3D professionals at this Blender Meetup and discuss Blender over a beer, or two.
Summertime is the best time for making plans. While everyone is out of town (as we can easily see in our Facebook feeds), we take the time for thinking over what we’d like to do next. It’s a time for fresh ideas to come to life. And because we’re part of a creative community with a strong appetite for innovation, we’d like to bring some of it into Render.st.
We’re planning of creating a richer experience for the people using our service. For this, we need a graphic designer with a strong understanding of the web, which is essentially an interactive space. There are things we want to change when communicating the RenderStreet story, but we also need to get the user flow right in the account dashboard. We’d love to work with someone who’ s used the #b3d hashtag at least once, knows the result to the meaning of life is and gets excited about animation releases.
Recently graduated from The National Film School of Denmark, William Reynish released his bachelor film Whole, that took one year to produce. Marius Iatan got William to reveal the project’s spicy moments that were put together in the amazing interview below. This, and some of William’s views on animation, 3D and creativity.
Marius Iatan: How did your professional skills evolve up to directing animation films? What would you choose instead, if you had to pick a different path?
William Reynish: I was always into animation. I grew up drawing a lot, and I liked to act. Animation is the natural combination of those two things. I worked as a character animator on other Blender projects such as Big Buck Bunny and Sintel.
An alternate career would be in software. I am passionate about software design.
There’s a huge opportunity to be the first really well-designed 3D app, and I think Blender should be it.
Marius: What were the turning points in your career – who or what inspired your life and where you are today?
Besides the continuous development of the software, Blender community’s performance depends on all individual artists continuously perfecting their skills. Books, video tutorials and courses are constantly providing education materials and are making Blender accessible for more and more people all around the world. Our own records show that last year we rendered jobs from 95 countries. This level of adoption was reached through personal involvement and devotion of the Blender users and trainers.
For 5 years, Andrew Price, running the known BlenderGuru website has been making tutorials, taking interviews, organizing contests, podcasting weekly and being an active Blender evangelist. His course focused on 3D architecture is soon rolling out its second edition. With the help of Anderson Alves Baptist and Reynante Martinez on the furniture modeling side and Rob Garlington keen on plant modeling, they prepared more than 100 new models for this edition of Architecture Academy.
The recent teaser rendered with RenderStreet illustrates how close to perfection 3D may accede:
Since we launched RenderStreet we planned to directly back up the Blender development effort, and at this moment we are in the position to do it. We subscribed to Blender Foundation’s Development Fund in order to help Blender developers keep working on an open source project that relies on the community’s help. The Fund also allows Blender Foundation to collaborate with the best Blender coders out there and make sure the project keeps growing.
The process is very transparent and the Foundation gives constant reports about how the money is spent, what features are being deployed and who is responsible for what. In 2014, three grants have already been awarded:
RenderStreet users by country
Our RenderStreet team is made of analytical, curious minds. One year after we launched RenderStreet, we searched the back end of our service to see where our users come from. The results also imply interesting facts about the actual number of Blender users, but they are only speculative. Anyhow, the map shows also Blender penetration, which represents more than 50% of the world’s countries.
RenderStreet was launched in Oct 2012 in Closed Beta with this bold announcement on BlenderArtists forum. After the service was tested and refined with the help of this great community, we launched it publicly, in February 2013.
This past year we put all our efforts into making RenderStreet a cutting edge rendering machine, keeping pace with Blender releases, increasing the computational power of the rendering farm and being close to our customers.
Today, we want our brand identity and website design to represent our solution that has turned to be one of the best on this market. RenderStreet must align its looks to its value – The next generation render farm for Blender.
In 2013 we had over 10.000 Blender projects that ran through our farm. They are all private work and most of them were never exposed publicly. But some are out there, on the world wide web. Here is a collection of some cool 3D images rendered with RenderStreet, publicly released by our clients.
The beautiful image Morning at the farmhouse made by Richard Hoatland. Rendered with Cycles, 1500 samples. Took about 1,25 hrs to complete with RenderStreet.
