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News from the RenderStreet team

Faster, better rendering subscription – the new RenderStreet One

      News

The RenderStreet One subscription has proven to be a precious tool for artists and studios needing to render large volumes with low budgets or have a rendering solution with fixed costs to help forecast company expenses. The plan has been going strong since its launch in 2017 and has delivered tens of millions of frames since then.

As you already know, we are periodically upgrading our hardware and we make every effort to offer the best possible cost/performance ratio to our users. We have upgraded the On Demand servers multiple times in the past and now it’s time to refresh the machines for the RenderStreet One plan as well.

The new machines have been in beta-testing for a while and we are now rolling them out in production gradually. They are faster (approximately twice as fast as the old ones, on average) and have twice the RAM (64 GB compared to 32 GB for the outgoing machines). The storage has been also upgraded to the fastest NVME solution available currently, for faster loading of the scenes. This means that you can now render larger, more demanding projects, and deliver them faster.

Rendering Blender projects for the past 10 years

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.

Is Blender rendering faster from one version to the next?

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.

Easier and cheaper Modo rendering with RenderStreet

      Modo, News

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.

Third GPU upgrade at our render farm in three years

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)

2020 – a good year for rendering

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.

Render multiple groups/passes at once in Modo

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.

Infrastructure upgrades: EU storage, private storage and more

      News

2020 is the year for the big releases on RenderStreet. Our new interface has been officially launched in April, and at the time I was promising more upgrades soon.

It’s now time to talk about the next one, which brings faster transfers and faster file processing for your renders. More specifically, this is about upgrades to our infrastructure, for both our core and our auxiliary (file management) services. Your file uploads and downloads will be faster, your movie previews and thumbnails will be generated more rapidly, the archives will be ready for download in a shorter time and the uploads to your cloud accounts will also be faster.

This is quite a large project (and also a critical one), as it involves code, hardware and networking changes. This means it took time to plan it, develop it and implement it. We are currently in the second phase of its release, and everything works as planned. As of now, two new features are officially available:

Support for multiple color profiles in Blender

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!

The new render management website is here!

      News

We have been working for a while now on reinventing our job management interface. You are spending a fair amount of time using it, and making things easier for you is one of our top priorities. So we started a new project, that resulted in a totally redesigned interface, created from scratch. The project has reached the RC phase now, and I’m excited to share it with you!

The main goal of the new interface is to help you be more productive. We analyzed the way you are using our service, and based on the data, we put emphasis on certain areas and made some functionality easier to access. Plus, there are a number of extra features that will help you focus on what is important: creating and delivering projects. And of course, the new interface adapts to the device you are using, from a phone to a large desktop screen.

New high-performance GPUs now available on RenderStreet

      News

At the beginning of 2019, we were announcing an upgrade in our GPU line-up. The new GPUs at the time (Nvidia® Tesla K80) came with almost double speed compared to the old ones, and three times more memory.

Now it’s time for a new upgrade. We are jumping forward three hardware architecture generations, from Kepler to Volta, and we’re powering new machines with Nvidia® V100 Tensor Core GPUs. The new GPUs are, as described by Nvidia, “The Most Advanced Data Center GPU Ever Built” and bring even more speed and 16 GB of RAM for your renders. As with the previous upgrade, there is no increase in the price you are paying for our services – this is a free performance upgrade. The new machines are live at this moment (in fact, they have been live for a while now, introduced gradually in production). And we’ve run the numbers for you, to see exactly how much better they are.

New, faster Blender plug-in

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.

Rendering 3D projects in 2019

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 🙂

Getting your projects rendered: RenderStreet in 2018

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.

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

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.

The new Modo denoiser is now supported on RenderStreet

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.

Eevee rendering supported on RenderStreet

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

New RenderStreet One yearly option

Since the launch of RenderStreet One, the monthly subscription plan has become our most popular option for artists requiring a fixed cost, always-on rendering solution.

Last year we’ve added two new payment methods that you’ve been asking for, Paypal and American Express. This update also unified the payment interface so everything was brought together making it easier to manage subscriptions and credits all in one place. Also in 2017 we have introduced a couple of new options for our members, the ability to render longer frames, and support for Modo rendering.

Now in 2018, because many of you asked, we thought you should start the year with some good news and a happier wallet so we’ve made RenderStreet One available as a yearly subscription.

Looking back at 2017 – 3D Rendering report

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: