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News from the RenderStreet team
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Category Archives: News
Blender conference 2017 highlights
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.
3rd party funding now available
A new feature is now available on RenderStreet: 3rd party funding. It allows you to receive funds intro your RenderStreet account from another person or company.
Such a feature can be used for:
New RenderStreet One options: Modo support and extended render time
We know how important RenderStreet One has become to our users. And we also know that, for many of you, it’s the only affordable way to accelerate your renders. We’re always listening to your feedback regarding the program. So, today we’re releasing an update with two of the options you requested. These are: support for Modo rendering and for rendering longer frames when needed.
New payment options available for the monthly plan RenderStreet One
We have just released an update to the RenderStreet One subscription payment module. The new version adds the possibility to subscribe using Paypal and AMEX – two features you have been asking for.
FMX 2017 highlights
With a German precision, the International Conference on Animation, Effects, VR, Games and Transmedia (or FMX, in short) happens every year when the spring is considering a comeback to Stuttgart. I’ve attended the past 4 editions and this is my favourite moment of the year to get updated on what studios and software publishers in the industry are doing. Plus, there’s a lot of eye candy, too – a lot of the latest blockbusters have their VFX broken down and explained by the studios that worked on them.
The reason for which I decided to write about this edition – after last writing about the 2014 one – was that this year, the industry seems to be finally committed to a few important directions:
The new RenderStreet – new design, better prices, support for Modo rendering
Today we are proudly launching our new website and we’re very excited about the changes that are rolled out in this new version. It’s the most important release since our service has been launched and it’s something that all of you will benefit from. Read on for more details:
- New design. If you are following our blog, you should be a bit familiar with the new design concept. You have seen it first published on our blog theme, and now we have pushed the update to the entire public site. In addition to the design, we have also reorganized some of the pages, in order to present our service in a clearer fashion. We hope you’ll like our new looks, and more importantly, that you will be able to find the information easier.
Upload your projects to our farm directly from Dropbox / Google Drive / OneDrive
Update 06 February 2017: Microsoft OneDrive has been added to the list of supported cloud services.
We are aware that many artists and teams are using online storage accounts for their projects. It’s an easy way to work together on the same files and it also has the advantage of being able to access the project from any location.
At the same time, we are aware of the fact that internet connections are not always the fastest thing on the planet. And if your project is already online, it would be a nice shortcut to have it downloaded to our render farm directly from there. So we added support for Dropbox and Google Drive, right in our interface.
A new look starting with 2017
It’s been four years since our official launch, almost a lifetime in ‘technology years’. We have come a long way in understanding you and your needs and in developing our tech to suit these particular needs. We have grown into a mature, established company now and we are changing our looks to match this reality.
Today we are releasing the new theme for our blog, which is also a preview of what is to come for our public site. Enjoy – and keep close for the main site update.
We’re sponsoring the Weekly CG Challenge!
The Weekly CG Challenge organized by AgenZasBrothers
AgenZasBrothers’ Weekly CG Challenge is a contest that has been picking up momentum due to its open nature—there are no restrictions regarding the software you use for the art—and the interesting themes. It’s a great way to test your skills, build up a portfolio, and hopefully enter the hall of fame. Besides, there are some cool prizes at stake!
For the next weeks, we’ll be supporting the Weekly CG Challenge contest and award the winner with a one-month subscription for RenderStret One —our all-you-can render program for Blender. There are other prizes too, so be sure to check out the contest page.
RenderStreet—facts and figures for 2015
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.
RenderStreet at Creative Business Cup 2015—Denmark
We’re soon celebrating three years since we launched RenderStreet—starting off bootstrapped, running our first years as a startup, and now shifting gears into a growing business and reaching out to new markets. Our evolution has been noticed by Creative Seeds, the national partner of Creative Business Cup initiative, who invited us to represent Romania at this year’s Creative Business Cup competition.
Creative Business Cup is organized by the Center for Cultural and Experience Economy and started as a national competition in Denmark in 2010. In 2012 CBC opened its doors to entrepreneurs from creative industries from around the world.
Blender conference 2015 – the concise view
The Blender Conference is, as you know, the biggest Blender-related event, and probably the only place where Blenderheads from all over the world come together every year. It’s also the place to learn first-hand about what’s coming next to Blender software and see who did what using Blender—there’s no shortage of ideas there, trust me. And finally, for me it’s also a good place to catch up with friends, and to meet some of the people I’ve only talked to by emails and tweets. Because of that, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Read how this year’s #BCon15 went, after the 2014 highlights and the sparkling 2013 moments.
Render all you can during #bcon15
We’re celebrating this year’s edition of Blender Conference with a special treat. During 23-25th of October we’ll be giving you access to our all-you-can-render program. Yes, you heard it well. Three days of rendering, for just $1.
We’re rolling this through our RenderStreet One program and you just need to pay one dollar at sign up. After joining, you’re good to go: upload your stuff and enjoy three days of rendering (program terms apply). No hidden costs, no bailout fees.
Texture baking in Blender (Cycles and Internal) now supported on RenderStreet
Over the past months we have received quite a few requests to introduce Blender texture baking on RenderStreet. Texture baking provides a way to store color, lighting and other rendering information in UV maps and save this information on the object. This means that, once the information has been saved, the object can be viewed lighted and textured without a big computational effort. The obvious use cases are real-time systems like games and, of course, more realistic scene previews.
We listened to you and now Blender texture baking is available on our farm (for Cycles and Blender Internal).
Get featured in our 2015 reel!
We’re halfway through the year now and, for most of us, the holiday season is knocking on the door. It’s also a good moment to look both back and forward to the things we’ve done in 2015 and to what’s next until the end of this year.
I know that for most of the 3D artists, one of the items that is always on the ‘to-do’ list is the reel. It’s visual art, and the first step in receiving appreciation for one’s work is showing that work to the world – in a reel. As an artist never stops working, each reel gets a life of its own, as it gets updated and evolves in time.
RenderStreet for Artists—sponsorship for open movies
Open movies have a huge impact for the people in the community: they help improve both the software tools and the personal skills of the artists. Helping to render these movies for free is our way of backing the open source movement and also the Blender community. A new edition of RenderStreet for Artists, our sponsorship program for open movies, just started to roll.
Mentoring Spherik Accelerator startups
We’re using high performance cloud services around the globe for our render farm and we’re doing this from Romania, a country traditionally associated with count Dracula and the communist regime. Allow us to update that image.
Now, the city of Cluj has been nominated the best city in Europe for air quality and Romania is among the countries with top internet speed. It’s also a software hub for big companies like Adobe, Oracle, and Microsoft. The industry is slowly making way for promising new players—ventures that make it big on the local market, as well as startups that are targeting exits within the large tech companies.
Cluj-Napoca is the European Youth Capital 2015.
How does ‘double GPU speed’ sound for your renders?
You may have noticed recently that your GPU renders on RenderStreet have been finishing faster. You don’t need to check your samples or resolution, it’s because of a new kind of server we’ve been silently testing in the past week. Besides putting the hardware online for real-world tests, we’ve also run some of the standard benchmarks, and here is the first good news:
