RenderStreet Blog

We just celebrated the 10th anniversary since RenderStreet’s public launch!

Back in 2013, we were proud to officially launch the first professional, dedicated farm for Blender artists and studios. Today, after one decade of growth, we are still going strong and providing one of the most recommended render farm services for the Blender and Modo communities.

Growing and developing a business is a challenging task. Growing and developing a business in a fast-changing environment, like the IT world, is even more so.

2020 – a good year for rendering

January 4, 2021

The year that just ended was a different one, with significant events happening: we lived through a worldwide pandemic, that changed the way we all live. On a different scale, another very meaningful event happened: a country completed the process of leaving the European Union for the first time in history.

As the only thing we can do is to push through, we focused on doing exactly that. And looking back now, I can say that 2020 was, for RenderStreet, the year with the highest number of major improvements from our 8-year activity.

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

May 13, 2020

“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.

May 10, 2020

Official music video for Sonic Boom’s “Things Like This (A Little Bit Deeper)” . Created by James Siewert, rendered with RenderStreet One.

Enjoy!

Rendering 3D projects in 2019

January 30, 2020

It’s the beginning of a new decade, and the numerologists are probably busy all over the world drawing hidden meanings from the 2020 number. In the meantime, in our office, part of the job is analyzing last year’s activity in order to build a better version of ourselves for the year to come.

2019 was the 5-year anniversary of our monthly plan RenderStreet One. With over 37 million frames rendered so far for artists, studios and students around the world, I’m glad to see that our efforts paid off and we were able to maintain a low-cost, dependable rendering solution for the Blender and Modo communities. It’s an option that makes rendering affordable for a lot of people that wouldn’t be able to use a render farm otherwise. And it accomplishes this without having to compromise: your projects don’t leave our infrastructure, everything remains fully private and confidential, and the plan is backed up by our tech support. Having a good rendering solution is important for an artist because it can go a long way to help improve their artistic and personal development. And this is, in fact, our end goal. So this one is a clear ‘win’ for everybody 🙂

Creating Involution – the will and the way

August 26, 2019

“[..]you don’t have to do everything on your own, you need to have a team and trust your team, have a process in which everybody collaborates. But if you are starting out and nobody helps you, you need to have willpower and find a way to tell your story, there’s always a way.” – Edgar Romero Pérez

Getting your projects rendered: RenderStreet in 2018

January 21, 2019

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.

Challenge accepted – F16 Trophy animation

July 9, 2018

Azad Boubrit

“I’ve always been very interested in science as well as fiction. I always thought that these two were linked because understanding and visualizing our world requires a powerful sense of imagination. That’s why I’m passionate about imagining the impossible, and I believe movies are the best candidates to stimulate the imagination.” – Azad Boubrit

Looking back at 2017 – 3D Rendering report

January 10, 2018

It’s the beginning of a new year and, as it’s our tradition by now, we’re sharing with you some of the behind-the-scenes activity from our farm. So, if you’re curious to learn how and what we did last year, read on.

If you’ve been using (or just following) us for a while, you know by now that we’re continuously improving our service and 2017 was no exception. We’ve rolled out a number of new features, both visible and invisible, sharing the same goal: to make your life easier. The ones that I’d add to a quick highlight list are: adding Modo support, unifying the payment system, adding upgrades to the monthly plan RenderStreet One and adding cloud operations for upload and download. And just a couple of weeks ago, in December, we released a network optimization upgrade for RenderStreet One for easier management of large assets. The effects have been very positive: the transfer time for large projects has been cut by up to 60% in some cases. This means more rendering power available to you!

Moving on to the numbers, here are the most relevant facts for our activity:

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

November 14, 2017

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!

Looking back at the rendering figures for 2016

Rendering 3D projects in 2016 – facts and figures for RenderStreet

January 16, 2017

We’re a couple of weeks into 2017 now, and it’s time for our yearly retrospective. As we are doing every year, we’re looking back to see what we have accomplished, and we’re hinting some of the things to come in the current year. You’re walking the path with us, so we’re sharing the experiences.

2016 has been a year defined by growth and focus for RenderStreet. Those two simple words have brought a number of interesting challenges, which were the driver for a sustained technology push. As a result, we have become even more flexible in addressing your needs and more efficient at the same time. This means we are now very well equipped to handle everything you can throw at us, including those awesome 360/VR images and videos you will be making this year.

Let’s see what this meant in numbers for 2016:

The making of the 360 Wales Green Party broadcast

May 10, 2016

Rendered with RenderStreet, Guest posts

Technology is opening up ways of communication that we couldn’t imagine before. The 360° view gives us control to look over our shoulder and immerse ourselves in the story, and virtual reality offers the next level in delivering the message and making the experience more powerful.

Chris McFall is one of the pioneers who uses Blender to create virtual environments. He now reveals the detailed making-of of the first 360° message for a political party in Wales.

Ward Trolley Animation, Rendered with RenderStreet

April 27, 2016

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.

Benchmarking Blender on RenderStreet, dual CPU and quad GPU

April 12, 2016

This February, the Blender Institute published a set of files that are used internally by the Cycles developers for testing purposes. They also released the configuration of the workstations they tested these files on, along with the render times for each configuration and scene.

We get asked a lot how fast are our servers, so we thought to give these files a test run and put the numbers here for everyone to see. This way we give you an idea of what kind of rendering speed we are offering, and how our machines perform.

February 1, 2016

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.

January 18, 2016

Blender, Rendered with RenderStreet, News

Another year has passed, and we’re again drawing the line to sum things up. We worked hard to follow the path we chose for RenderStreet and its mission—to help artists and studios deliver awesome 3D work—to the best of our abilities. We were able to secure the resources and bring to life the second edition of our RenderStreet for Artists program, extending the free rendering for open projects for another year. We launched RenderStreet One, offering a low-cost alternative for the users that need to keep their rendering budget in check.

Image by Joe Mabel via Wikimedia Commons

Also, our effort in finding a way to further help small and medium studios had its first tangible results with the custom studio rendering plan released in the second half of the year. This new service tier proved to be a great enabler to studios that have a Blender pipeline or larger rendering volumes and we’ve got confirmation it’s on the right track. It’s invitation-only at the moment, but if you’re doing volumes of pro work in Blender and need an external rendering resource that won’t burn a hole in your pocket, drop us a line.

November 10, 2015

Rendered with RenderStreet

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:

September 7, 2015

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:

January 22, 2015

Blender, Rendered with RenderStreet, News

As 2014 is done with, we drew the line to see what happened, what are the relevant figures for our service and what went different from 2013. We’re sharing them here, as we think we’ve got some interesting results that speak about the work that we’re doing behind the scenes and our stubbornness to surpass our standards.

Here are the RenderStreet stats for 2014:

99.89% uptime. This means 9 hours downtime in the entire year. It’s two hours more than last year, because of platform migrations we had to implement.
Over 15,000 jobs, with a 99% success rate in job delivery. Only 1% of the jobs had issues that prevented them from being successfully finished. And, as you might have experienced, we make every effort to deliver. This is an improvement over the next year, and one we’re proud of, especially considering the increased rendering volume.
85% of the animations were delivered in under 71 minutes in average. A good figure, showing constant performance over the year.
Highest acceleration, compared to the client’s machine: 533x, or 1.5 hours compared to over 1 month (the comparison base was a 2012 iMac).

December 22, 2014