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:
If you’re an indie, you know how difficult it is to get financing for your movie. The internet is booming with webinars, books and articles that want to teach you the secret sauce of getting the money for your production. At the same time, the checklist that you need to complete in order to have a shot at actually getting any money is getting longer by the day. The investors are looking for more and more insurance for their ROI and the big studios are hard to reach. And once you got a meeting with a potential investor, you’d better have a production manager, an accountant and a lawyer at your side. You’ll need these guys for answering all the questions related to the business plan that you’ve prepared in advance and to negotiate the profit distribution in the happy event that there is one. There are also the options of doing crowdfunding, or pre-sales, and they all come with their own challenges.
Image by Tamara podolchak
We’re very excited (and exhausted after these past weeks of full speed preparations) to announce the opening of our newest program for unlimited rendering!
One month ago we started the registrations for our flat fee rendering program, RenderStreet One. The new program is designed to make rendering more accessible to every artist, and we believe it will be of great help to those who need a permanent external rendering resource, on a budget.
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:
We’ve been trying to understand how different users do their work, in order to come with better solutions for their rendering needs. One common feedback suggested that it would be nice to be able to render the project several times while in development, without any added rendering costs. So we started thinking about how this could be done and came up with a plan.
RenderStreet ONE, our newest all-you-can-render, flat fee tier, is now open for registrations. The program is designed for people who have constant rendering needs and want an always-on resource they can offload their work to. This will ensure close, precise, control of the results, making the 3D renders more available throughout the process.
Since launching RenderStreet, we knew the render previews are an essential part of what we want to offer. At first, the solution we found was a thumbnail of the rendered image in the job view page which shows the last frame that was fully rendered. After implementing the thumbnail, we added real-time previews that work well for still images. They show a preview of the rendered image, as shown by Blender, while rendering. Now we’re taking it to the next level.
The 2014 edition of Europe’s largest startup event Slush took place this November in Finland’s cold capital. A huge venue with 4 stages and lots of showcase space for guest companies (including RenderStreet) hosted an audience of 10,000 people, in just 2 days.
Slush was surrounded by over 20 side events, usually addressed to specialised communities. I chose to go to an IGDA Finland event, was invited to pitch at EBAN (European Business Angels Conference) and went to cheer for the startups that graduated the fall batch of Startup Sauna accelerator.
For the last weekend of October, the De Balie center in Amsterdam became again, the Blenderhead Central. It was my second time to attend Blender Conference, and I was happy to meet both old friends and fresh comers. This is how #BCon14 looked like on the spot.
The Blender community in Romania is quite small, but there are a few talented people we want to meet and get to know better. So we’re inviting the local 3D professionals at this Blender Meetup and discuss Blender over a beer, or two.
Summertime is the best time for making plans. While everyone is out of town (as we can easily see in our Facebook feeds), we take the time for thinking over what we’d like to do next. It’s a time for fresh ideas to come to life. And because we’re part of a creative community with a strong appetite for innovation, we’d like to bring some of it into Render.st.
We’re planning of creating a richer experience for the people using our service. For this, we need a graphic designer with a strong understanding of the web, which is essentially an interactive space. There are things we want to change when communicating the RenderStreet story, but we also need to get the user flow right in the account dashboard. We’d love to work with someone who’ s used the #b3d hashtag at least once, knows the result to the meaning of life is and gets excited about animation releases.
Blender’s fast-paced release cycle is a unique differentiator in the 3D modeling world. Its purpose is to come up with new features, updates and bug fixes fast. Among the trade-offs stands a continuous learning process and the fact that there are bugs that need to be fixed. But this is part of Blender’s charm, and I think it’s well worth it.
During the last few releases, the ‘Cycles improvements’ section in the release notes has been constantly populated. And almost all recent releases come with the promise of speed improvement.
At RenderStreet, we probably have the widest array of Blender versions available for rendering from all render farms (2.63 and upwards). So we put on our scientist lab coats in an attempt to test them out, see how they perform on server-grade hardware and identify the best version available for our users. The model of choice was the Pabellon Barcelona Cycles scene that Hamza Cheggour published on his eMirage site. This file is on its way to replace the famous BMW as the ‘standard’ benchmark for Cycles, so we decided to use it for this purpose.
The tests started with a̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶r̶ Blender 2.66 and went through the newest version, Blender 2.71. Server configurations used were 2 x Tesla M2090 for GPU, and 2 x Xeon E5-2670 for CPU. RenderStreet render times for Blender Cycles are revealed in the chart below:
Startup Sauna spring batch 2014
This spring, Sorin and I relocated in Helsinki, as RenderStreet got accepted into the Startup Sauna accelerator program. It was also the first time for us to visit Finland. So how did this double premiere go for RenderStreet? In two words: extreme.
12 minutes animation Whole, sponsored from our RenderStreet for Artists Program, had its official release in Copenhagen. William Reynish directed Whole as his bachelor film project for The National Film School of Denmark. He applied for rendering with RenderStreet in November, and now the movie is hitting major festivals internationally.
On Monday, Sorin and I arrived in Helsinki, for the Startup Sauna 5 week accelerator program. RenderStreet and other 16 European startups were selected out of 403 applications to be part of the accelerator’s spring batch. We’re delighted to see how Startup Sauna summed up what we do up on the RenderStreet startup page.
Besides the continuous development of the software, Blender community’s performance depends on all individual artists continuously perfecting their skills. Books, video tutorials and courses are constantly providing education materials and are making Blender accessible for more and more people all around the world. Our own records show that last year we rendered jobs from 95 countries. This level of adoption was reached through personal involvement and devotion of the Blender users and trainers.
For 5 years, Andrew Price, running the known BlenderGuru website has been making tutorials, taking interviews, organizing contests, podcasting weekly and being an active Blender evangelist. His course focused on 3D architecture is soon rolling out its second edition. With the help of Anderson Alves Baptist and Reynante Martinez on the furniture modeling side and Rob Garlington keen on plant modeling, they prepared more than 100 new models for this edition of Architecture Academy.
The recent teaser rendered with RenderStreet illustrates how close to perfection 3D may accede:
FMX, the well-known European conference themed on film industry, animation and transmedia has reached its 20th edition. I was in Stuttgart for the entire period – almost a week – and got an interesting insight in what’s trending and the future of the industry.
Mike Pan’s famous test subject, in progress of being rendered
For those who are rendering complex still images, we added a new feature: real time preview of the rendered image on RenderStreet.
Since we launched RenderStreet we planned to directly back up the Blender development effort, and at this moment we are in the position to do it. We subscribed to Blender Foundation’s Development Fund in order to help Blender developers keep working on an open source project that relies on the community’s help. The Fund also allows Blender Foundation to collaborate with the best Blender coders out there and make sure the project keeps growing.
The process is very transparent and the Foundation gives constant reports about how the money is spent, what features are being deployed and who is responsible for what. In 2014, three grants have already been awarded:
RenderStreet users by country
Our RenderStreet team is made of analytical, curious minds. One year after we launched RenderStreet, we searched the back end of our service to see where our users come from. The results also imply interesting facts about the actual number of Blender users, but they are only speculative. Anyhow, the map shows also Blender penetration, which represents more than 50% of the world’s countries.
RenderStreet has been up and running for one year. And it’s been an exciting year for us and our busy Blender users. Many projects have run through our render farm since we turned on the servers, and we’re proud to say we’ve fast tracked quite a lot of them.
Fast rendering can be compared to driving a sports car. Once you’ve had it, it’s very hard to go back to the average sedan or minivan. And that feeling is similar to what we’re experiencing in our business. The joy in our work keeps us engaged and there’s no other way than going harder, better, faster, stronger.
As we announced earlier this year, Render Street’s image was in need of a change. Now we’re celebrating Render Street’s 1 year anniversary with a new website design and a re-styled identity. We are happy to share with you, the incredible Blender community, our dear clients and partners: the new render.st
