One place we should definitely not skip when trying to improve our render time is the Performance panel in Render tab.
Rendering to tiles makes better use of the processor power. In the newest Blender version, the numbers in the tiles section means their size in pixels, but understanding which size works best is a bit baffling. Tests showed that GPUs work best with 256 x 256 tiles while CPU makes best use of the 64 x 64 tile size (regardless of whether we are talking about BI or Cycles on CPU).
It’s been a long waited feature for Blender, and finally SSS is here. That’s Sub-Surface Scattering for those of you not familiar with the acronym. It means that the light penetrates the object surface and reflects / refracts in the depth of the object, not only on the surface.
What does it mean to have support for this? At least more realistic skin, but generally speaking better and more realistic materials for your renders.
We are aware that, for some of you, the way the uploads worked on RenderStreet was less than optimal. When we originally conceived the user interface for RenderStreet, we were of the opinion that FTP support is a thing of the past, something that has to do with the way the internet worked in its initial days, when the web was not so advanced as it is now.
We recently became aware that baking very large animations takes quite some time on RenderStreet. We set out to see what the issues are and how we can improve the baking time. The first impressions was that there’s no chance to improve it, because most of the baking is done on a single thread. But we kept on researching and found there are ways to do it.
This week, we’ve quietly pushed a number of updates on our site. Most have been bug fixes and algorithm improvements, not worth mentioning here. A few of these improvements are interesting though: FLM file output for LuxRender renders, capturing of the output from “file output” nodes, and faster file downloads. Let’s look at each of them in a bit more detail.
Just a quick note about the updates we have pushed live today.
Being notified about a major bug in Luxrender 1.2, which will cause version 1.2.1 to be released soon, we have updated our build to incorporate the fix for this bug.
Also, since Blender 2.66a is going to be released tomorrow, we went ahead and pushed it live on our farm today. This includes a number of fixes and makes the 2.66 version even more stable.
We promised LuxRender support since we first launched our closed beta. It’s been a long time since then, and I am proud to say that today we just released beta support for LuxRender 1.2. Since this is the first time we implement support for LuxRender, we thought it would be best to start with the latest version anyway.
Blender 2.66 has been in the making for some time, and it brings a lot of new features, some of them expected for a long time. Read the official release log for more information on what is new.
We always strive to bring support for the latest Blender releases on RenderStreet. And when building a new version is very easy and straight forward, we add support as soon as it is released by the Blender Foundation.
In the case on 2.66, we managed to build it quick enough, so I am proud to announce that RenderStreet supports Blender 2.66 as of today. That’s only 5 hours after the official release. And I bet we are the first render farm to support blender 2.66.
We’ve spent a lot of time working on getting all physics to work flawlessly on our farm. The result is that almost every type of bake is supported and can be baked on our farm. There is one notable exception caused by a bug in Blender, as noted at the end of this article.
At this time, we only support baking files on our farm, due to the length of time it takes sometimes to upload the bake files. We are looking into adding support for bake uploads, but it’s going to take a while, as we’ll have to add support for FTP uploads first.
Update 2015: It is now possible to upload your own bake cache and use it to render your files on our farm. For more info on how to do this please see our knowledge base.
We’ve worked on RenderStreet for a long time – since January 2012. During this time, we’ve learned a lot, especially about Blender and how to interact with it. It’s has been an interesting time and a great start from RenderStreet.
After 13 months in development and closed beta, we have officially opened up for the public on February 6th. Now everybody can use the site and enjoy fast rendering for their projects. We are considering the service still in beta though, but it’s open beta now and the chances of bugs being encountered are very small now.
