FreeStyle has been available for Blender for some time, but it required a separate build of Blender. That made it difficult to support it on our farm. With the inclusion in the main development trunk with 2.67, FreeStyle will make it into the official release of Blender, so we can support it at RenderStreet as well. Hello cartoon face 🙂
I am proud to announce that we have recently acquired the blenderrenders.com website. This marks a new step in our expansion, and brings on board the oldest Blender dedicated render farm. Since RenderStreet already offers all the features included on BlenderRenders, we decided to invite all the users from the acquired site to join our farm, and give them an extended signup bonus, to facilitate the transition.
Full press release after the break
We added support for rendering your Blender projects with LuxRender on RenderStreet some time ago. That was all fine and we were able to serve our customers who used both Blender and Luxrender. Though the problem remained that not all people using LuxRender build their projects with Blender. We’be been working for some time on this and the fruits of that work can be seen as of this week.
OSL has been supported in Blender for some time, and we have been working on adding it to RenderStreet as well. It should have been supported some time ago, but we ran into issues building the support for the OSL compiler on our platform. So , because of that, it has been delayed for a while.
It’s been a long waited feature for Blender, and finally SSS is here. That’s Sub-Surface Scattering for those of you not familiar with the acronym. It means that the light penetrates the object surface and reflects / refracts in the depth of the object, not only on the surface.
What does it mean to have support for this? At least more realistic skin, but generally speaking better and more realistic materials for your renders.
We are aware that, for some of you, the way the uploads worked on RenderStreet was less than optimal. When we originally conceived the user interface for RenderStreet, we were of the opinion that FTP support is a thing of the past, something that has to do with the way the internet worked in its initial days, when the web was not so advanced as it is now.
I am proud to announce that we have been accepted in the Microsoft’s startup program BizSpark Plus. This is an important achievement for us, and proves the value of our technology and business approach to the rendering market.
We recently became aware that baking very large animations takes quite some time on RenderStreet. We set out to see what the issues are and how we can improve the baking time. The first impressions was that there’s no chance to improve it, because most of the baking is done on a single thread. But we kept on researching and found there are ways to do it.
This week, we’ve quietly pushed a number of updates on our site. Most have been bug fixes and algorithm improvements, not worth mentioning here. A few of these improvements are interesting though: FLM file output for LuxRender renders, capturing of the output from “file output” nodes, and faster file downloads. Let’s look at each of them in a bit more detail.
Just a quick note about the updates we have pushed live today.
Being notified about a major bug in Luxrender 1.2, which will cause version 1.2.1 to be released soon, we have updated our build to incorporate the fix for this bug.
Also, since Blender 2.66a is going to be released tomorrow, we went ahead and pushed it live on our farm today. This includes a number of fixes and makes the 2.66 version even more stable.
We promised LuxRender support since we first launched our closed beta. It’s been a long time since then, and I am proud to say that today we just released beta support for LuxRender 1.2. Since this is the first time we implement support for LuxRender, we thought it would be best to start with the latest version anyway.
Blender 2.66 has been in the making for some time, and it brings a lot of new features, some of them expected for a long time. Read the official release log for more information on what is new.
We always strive to bring support for the latest Blender releases on RenderStreet. And when building a new version is very easy and straight forward, we add support as soon as it is released by the Blender Foundation.
In the case on 2.66, we managed to build it quick enough, so I am proud to announce that RenderStreet supports Blender 2.66 as of today. That’s only 5 hours after the official release. And I bet we are the first render farm to support blender 2.66.
We’ve worked on RenderStreet for a long time – since January 2012. During this time, we’ve learned a lot, especially about Blender and how to interact with it. It’s has been an interesting time and a great start from RenderStreet.
After 13 months in development and closed beta, we have officially opened up for the public on February 6th. Now everybody can use the site and enjoy fast rendering for their projects. We are considering the service still in beta though, but it’s open beta now and the chances of bugs being encountered are very small now.
