I’m sitting down (virtually) with Panayiotis Christophorou, discussing his short animated film “Invitation For Return”. The movie, for which the concept was created almost 30 years ago, is a metaphor for the tumultuous times seen by Cyprus in recent history. I found the project story fascinating, and I asked Panayiotis to share some glimpses from it with you, in an attempt to paint a picture of what it meant to create the short film that has been (probably) the longest time in development.
As you probably know, Modo has officially been discontinued, at version 17. You can read the official announcement made by Foundry here, and download your End Of Life License if you don’t have it already.
Deciding to discontinue a product after 21 years has undoubtedly been a difficult decision for Foundry. At the same time, we know some artists and studios are still working with Modo for the time being. As one of our core values is to always help our clients, we have decided to keep supporting Modo on RenderStreet for the time being. For technical reasons (v.17.1 doesn’t work correctly on Linux), the last available version on our farm is 17.0. We also have the older releases available, if your project has been created a while back and not upgraded.
Happy rendering!
The RenderStreet team
Rendering Modo projects with RenderStreet just got easier – and also cheaper, with our monthly plan.
The new Modo plug-in helps launch a Modo render on RenderStreet with just one click. There is no need to consolidate the file manually or collect the assets to send them to our farm. Our plug-in will do this for you automatically. In addition to images, it will also collect image sequences, IES lights, and MDD files and send them to our farm along with the project.
We have been supporting render groups and passes for Modo on RenderStreet for a while now. So far, the system only allowed selecting a single group and either a single pass or all passes for rendering in a job.
As you have requested an upgrade for this feature, we obliged and implemented it.
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.
We always strive to offer complete support for all the functionality of the 3D packages we support on our render farm. So we upgraded our systems to include the new features added by the latest release of Modo – the NVIDIA® OptiX™ denoiser (introduced in Modo version 12.2). The denoiser is GPU-based and, on our infrastructure, it runs on specially-configured servers that are also equipped with high-performance dual Xeon E5-series CPUs.
You can see below some tests made with the denoiser in a simple scene from Modo’s samples. There were three renders: one with the default quality settings of the scene, one with low-quality settings and the third with the same low-quality settings, plus the denoise step. All the renders were made at 2220 x 1440 px.
