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Category Archives: Blender

Articles covering Blender 3D related subjects

Blender-versions-speed-comparison-benchmark-1-Victor (RenderStreet)

Is Blender rendering faster from one version to the next?

      Blender, News

We render tens of thousands of frames every day, 365 days per year. During this time, we monitor all the processes, to be able to proactively make adjustments and fixes, when necessary. The resulting data sometimes shows interesting side results; in this case, I’m going to refer to speed differences in rendering.

Starting with Blender 3.0 we have noticed that, for the exact same hardware, different projects behave in quite different ways. Some projects render in comparable times on our CPU and GPU machines. Some projects render way faster on the GPU servers. And a small fraction of the projects actually render faster on CPU – usually, projects that make use of volumetrics and/or motion blur may fall into this category.

This sparked a new question – are there speed differences between various Blender versions, too? And this is a question we can answer, seeing that at the time of writing this, we support Blender starting with version 2.75 until version 3.4.

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Third GPU upgrade at our render farm in three years

      Blender, News

That’s right. We have upgraded the RenderStreet GPU machines for the third time in as many years, so we can offer you faster than ever renders at a lower cost. The new T4 GPUs are power-efficient data center GPUs based on Nvidia’s Turing architecture and each new server holds 4 such GPUs, with 16 GB of RAM per GPU. Read on to see how they fare against the previous-gen Volta boards in our rendering battery of tests.

One more thing before you begin: the new GPUs are already live – in fact, if you use RenderStreet, you have been using them for the past month. The hourly price remains the same, which means that your renders are now cheaper – because they complete faster.

We put the new boards to our standard battery of eight Blender Cycles rendering tests, to see how they perform. Each scene was rendered twice, and the lowest time was recorded. Let’s see the numbers! (new GPUs are shown in green)

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Multilayer EXR On RenderStreet One

Multilayer EXR output now available for our monthly plan with Blender

      Blender

As more and more freelancers are taking on the RenderStreet One monthly plan for professional work, we have been receiving requests to add support for Multilayer EXR output for this plan. This was necessary for artists that have a pipeline built around this format or those who were using external compositing tools that needed the Cryptomatte data available, and we wanted to accommodate the request.

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Fatherhood_07

“Fatherhood” – Creating a contest-winning short in six days

      Blender, Rendered with RenderStreet, Interviews

“Limitless worlds at the power of my fingertips, it’s a beautiful feeling.”

Today’s interview has Brennan Karem as storyteller. Experienced VFX artist and also a director of both camera and animation work, Brennan tells a very entertaining story about his latest short, “Fatherhood”. It’s a story about effort, determination and also personal achievement. This has been one of my favorite interviews so far, and I’m sure you’ll find it interesting on more than one level.

Marius: You created this short for the “Stay at home” challenge from Film Riot. How did you decide to participate?

Brennan: I’ve been following Film Riot for years. Actually, I found them pretty much when they first started. They frequently hold online film festivals/contests and I’ve always wanted to participate but have never had the chance. Whether it was work or personal life, I just haven’t ever had the time before.

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Support for multiple color profiles in Blender

Support for multiple color profiles in Blender

      Blender, News

Update 2023-01: The AgX profile is now available as well for rendering your projects.

We have just added support for multiple color profiles in Blender on our farm. If you needed to use a non-default profile for your project, now you can render it on RenderStreet with the same settings.

The profiles supported at this moment, in addition to the default one, are:

  • Filmic (the 3rd party version). Of course, we have support for the built-in Filmic as well
  • ARRI Reference
  • ACES 1.2

The new profiles are available with Blender 2.82a and newer, and can only be accessed in our new render management interface.

Happy rendering!

RenderStreet new blender plugin

New, faster Blender plug-in

      Blender, News

We’ve been working for a while now on the technology layer on which RenderStreet is based. A lot of internal components have been upgraded, and others are in the process of being upgraded and will be released in the near future.

The Blender add-on has already received a significant upgrade. While the basic functionality has remained the same (a future update will add new features), the new version has a couple of advantages over the old one.

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Eevee vs cycles benchmark 1 dragon

Cycles vs Eevee rendering – speed comparison

      Blender

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.

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Rendering at RenderStreet in 2018

Getting your projects rendered: RenderStreet in 2018

      Modo, Blender, Rendered with RenderStreet, News

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.

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New GPUs on our farm – twice the speed, same price

      Blender, News

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.

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Eevee rendering supported on RenderStreet

      Blender, News

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 is supported on RenderStreet on our GPU servers. We are reinforcing our commitment to fully support 3D artists and to provide you with the tools you need for your work. We are the first (and currently, the only) render farm offering support for Eevee at this moment.

Happy blending!

Image “Ember Forest” created by Mike Pan

Jonas Melin’s Arts Program story

      Blender, Interviews

Jonas Melin – Teacher and Program Leader

In Sweden’s Upper Secondary School, there is a three year higher education preparatory Arts Program held by S:t Eriks Gymnasium. It features an animation topic that aims to develop students’ abilities to communicate using digital tools.

We’ve recently had a talk with the program leader, arts and design teacher Jonas Melin, to understand his perspective on animation and to hear the Program’s story.

“When we started this Animation profile in 2011, we had a big problem with the render times for 3D. Our computers are good for 2D, but for photorealistic renderings, they are way too slow.” – Mr. Jonas Melin, teacher and program leader

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Benchmark 6 - Victor. Render time in h:mm:ss, lower is better

Blender 2.80 hybrid (CPU+GPU) rendering – speed and quality

      Blender, Tutorials

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.

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What do NASA, US Special Operations Command and Blender have in common?

      Blender, Rendered with RenderStreet, Interviews

The answer is: Hugo Shelley, and his crew, having reached the final stages of the Cubesat Challenge with their LSAT system.

The project is a very interesting (little) satellite, capable of helping out soldiers on the battlefield. Read on to find out from Hugo himself how the team got there.

Update: Team LSAT has won one of the four $5000 prizes of The Cubesat Challenge’s 3U category.
Congratulations to all involved for their exceptional work!

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Blender conference 2017 highlights

      Blender, News

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.

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Roman Volkov – A 3D hobby taken to the next level

      Blender, Interviews

My first contact with Roman’s work was through blenderartists.org forum. Being a car aficionado myself, I naturally took a liking to his art. The things that really impressed me though, were the close-up and outdoor renders. The reflections were just right, the light spot on (pun intended) and the overall look was worthy of a manufacturer’s catalogue. In fact, at a certain point I thought they could be easily mistaken for real photos of a car.
Read on to find out how he works and his very interesting views about modelling and more.

 

Hi Roman, you told me that 3D art is currently a hobby of yours. Tell  us a little bit about how you got into it.

Oh, it’s a long story. From my very childhood I liked drawing and freehand modelling. When studying in school, this passion gradually moved into a digital world.
My first steps in 3D art

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