@RenderStreet Amazing service guys! You've just saved me a lot of time. Consider me a regular customer now. And the fantastic price! Superb!
— Pather Thomas (@pather23) May 26, 2017
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Author Archives: Sorin
New render feature: live preview for animations in progress
Since launching RenderStreet, we knew the render previews are an essential part of what we want to offer. At first, the solution we found was a thumbnail of the rendered image in the job view page which shows the last frame that was fully rendered. After implementing the thumbnail, we added real-time previews that work well for still images. They show a preview of the rendered image, as shown by Blender, while rendering. Now we’re taking it to the next level.
Newest Blender makes CPU faster than GPU rendering
It’s been a few weeks since Blender 2.72a was released, so it was about time to test it out and see how CPU and GPU rendering speed perform in the latest Blender version.
As in the last tests, we are using for benchmarking the Pabellon Barcelona Cycles scene, that Hamza Cheggour published on his eMirage site. As soon as the rendering was finished, I was amazed by the results. In this version, CPU rendering is faster than GPU. I repeated the test, to make sure there was no mistake, and tried to understand why this happens.
Sparkling moments from Blender Conference
We just got back from the Blender Conference in Amsterdam. It was an impressive show, with lots of engaging presentations and many talks you could learn from. The overall atmosphere was very close to the Blender spirit: open source style, a bit chaotic, but kept on track and delivering good content.
Marius Iatan and Sorin Vinatoru, founders of RenderStreet, among other participants at the Blender Conference. Cheers guys!
Blender plugin available on all platforms
Our Blender plugin is now available for all platforms. This means you can use it in Windows, MacOSX and Linux, with Blender 2.67 or newer. After installing it, you will be able to send renders to our farm and check their status, all from Blender’s interface. The plugin handles the file upload to our farm in a secure way, and launches the render automatically. It also displays a list of your recent jobs, and you can click in the list to open the job page and download the files.
Blender 2.69 RC1 is up
Blender 2.69 RC1 has been put up by the Foundation about 3 days ago, so we started working on having it available on our farm as well. This didn’t take long and the new version is available on our farm right now.
Please note that this is a release candidate, so it might contain bugs. Use it on your own risk, and for testing purposes only.
Meet us in Amsterdam, at the Blender conference
Both Sorin and Marius will be in Amsterdam between October 24th and October 29th, attending the Blender conference there. Marius will also take part in the panel about commercializing, where he will present our challenges and accomplishments in working with Blender in a commercial environment.
If you happen to be at the conference this year, send us an email, or leave a comment below. We’ll love to meet you in person and have a chat.
New Job and File retention policy
It’s been more than 6 months since we launched our live service and things are going well. We rendered a lot of jobs in the past 6 months, and at this point we need to introduce a file and job retention policy, so we do not store your files on our servers longer than needed.
To this extent, we have elaborated the following retention policy. We will keep the jobs and files for a set amount of time, depending on the membership level.
An easier way to add jobs
Since launch, we have collected feedback from you regarding the job management interface. We have slightly refined the interface in time, based on this feedback. But one of the major pain points was the inability to tweak the project parameters without uploading the file again. And sometimes these files can get very large. We listened to the feedback and I am happy to announce a major update to the job submission interface.
Architecture Academy trailer rendered with us
I am happy to announce that BlenderGuru’s new course intro materials have been rendered on RenderStreet. It was my pleasure to welcome Andrew among our customers and see the awesome renders he created for his course.
Below are a couple of images reproduced with permission from Architecture Academy’s website. More pictures here, check it out for more goodies rendered on RenderStreet.
The Architecture Academy registration will be open until 17th July 4PM GMT, so hurry up and grab your seat.
Blender 2.68 RC1 available now
Blender 2.68 RC1 has been released by the Blender Foundation a couple weeks ago. We have finally managed to add that to our farm, so you can send your projects using this version as well. It took us a bit of time to add it because it uses a different CUDA version and we ran into compatibility issues with it. All that was fixed in the end and I am happy to have this live.
The most expected feature in this release is the ability to render cycles hair on GPU. So the projects that use hair will no longer have to be rendered on CPU machines, and will be able to benefit from the GPU speedup.
To illustrate the GPU speedup, I took BlenderGuru’s Sintel file and rendered the same image with 2.67b and 2.68 RC1. 2.67b (image on the left) was rendered on CPU, 2.68 RC1 (on the right) was rendered on GPU. The times look like this:
- CPU: 51 minutes
- GPU: 43 minutes (16% faster)
A second test we did involves only hair (see image below). Here are the times for it:
- CPU: 5:22 minutes
- GPU: 4:46 minutes (12% faster)
My conclusion is that, even though it’s faster to render the hair on GPU, the gain in performance is not as much as expected. This might be because we have very powerful CPU servers. Likely the gain on a lower power desktop computer will be higher than this.
Have you rendered anything interesting with 2.68? Post it in the comments.
Rendered with us – Sports car animation
This just came in, a nice sports car created by Mariusz of www.mac300.pl .
Have you rendered anything interesting? Let us know in the comments and we might feature it.
Extended “about us” story
This story was originally published in the Blender Art Magazine issue #41. You can read it in the magazine, and we are reproducing it here for your convenience.
In this article, I am going to write about the story of RenderStreet, the next generation render farm dedicated to rendering Blender projects. I will touch on the topics of how we came up with the idea, what was like building it and how it turned out in the current stage.
Blender 2.67b is up
Just a quick note to let you know that we have updated the blender 2.67 version we have on the site to the latest released by the Foundation. So the current version is now 2.67b. This ads a number of fixes over the 2.67a version and should increase the stability of the renders done with it.
Rendering anything interesting with 2.67? Let me know in the comments.
Blender 2.67 support added
It’s here. The long awaited Blender 2.67, with it’s support for SSS and FreeStyle has been released a couple days ago by the Blender Foundation. As usual, we added support for it just a day after it has been released, so you can enjoy this stable release of Blender.
We have also moved all projects that were using the latest SVN version of blender to use the stable 2.67 instead and removed the support for that SVN version.
Upload projects without packing
When we built the first version of RenderStreet, we started with the idea that we can take advantage of Blender’s pack external data feature and make sure the files are uploaded properly, with all the data needed to render them.
As they say, no plan survives the contact with the customer, so a while after we launched we ran into issues with Blender features not supported by the pack operation. Some of them, like the external libraries, were fixed by the dev team. Others, like the font embedding, had workarounds. But it became obvious that sooner or later we will run into something that can’t be supported at all.
Blender Network interview
There’s an interview with me on the BlenderNetwork site. You can check it out on their site:
http://www.blendernetwork.org/blog/interview-render-street
FreeStyle rendering added
FreeStyle has been available for Blender for some time, but it required a separate build of Blender. That made it difficult to support it on our farm. With the inclusion in the main development trunk with 2.67, FreeStyle will make it into the official release of Blender, so we can support it at RenderStreet as well. Hello cartoon face 🙂
LuxRender standalone finally supported
We added support for rendering your Blender projects with LuxRender on RenderStreet some time ago. That was all fine and we were able to serve our customers who used both Blender and Luxrender. Though the problem remained that not all people using LuxRender build their projects with Blender. We’be been working for some time on this and the fruits of that work can be seen as of this week.
OSL support added
OSL has been supported in Blender for some time, and we have been working on adding it to RenderStreet as well. It should have been supported some time ago, but we ran into issues building the support for the OSL compiler on our platform. So , because of that, it has been delayed for a while.
