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.
If you have been using Raypump and need an alternative option for your rendering needs, give RenderStreet a try. With high-performance CPU and GPU rendering servers and several pricing options – including a $50 unlimited rendering one – RenderStreet can address all your rendering needs.
Read more about switching from Raypump to RenderStreet and see how we can help accelerate your renders.
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.
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.
At last year’s Blender Conference, a title caught my eye in the schedule: “Automotive design with Blender”. I was intrigued and went to see the track. And this is how I had my first contact with Mathilde – a young and talented artist, who drove the adoption of Blender in Tata Motors’ UK design center. Read on to find out what Blender is used for in the car design department, and what are some of the challenges of a product design pipeline.
Update: see the winners!
It’s been one year since we launched RenderStreet One, our flat fee rendering program, and it was a great experience to see it evolve and attract more and more users. We decided to take a risk when we came up with this program, and we’re glad to see that it paid off and the program provides real value to budget-conscious users.
Contest and prizes: We decided to celebrate RenderStreet One’ anniversary together with the Blender community and have a little get-together in form of a skill contest. The challenge will bring the winner a one-year subscription for (what else?) our all you can render—RenderStreet One—program. For the second and third places, the prizes are 6 months and respectively 3 months of access to RenderStreet One, and we’re also giving a one-month subscription for other 3 mentions. In total, this adds up to 24 months of free rendering for some talented people looking to get the rendering stage out of their mind and out of their homes or offices. And to top that up, The Cycles Material Vault is sponsoring the contest and granting to the 1st place winner a copy of their all-new materials library. How does that sound to you?
I first met Sean a couple of years ago and I remember that I enjoyed listening to him telling stories from the VFX world on the other side of the ocean. He’s a good storyteller too, so pretty quickly he had a captive audience around the table.
The story he is telling today is about his career so far, and I’m really glad he agreed to do it on our blog. If you are working in the VFX industry or are considering a job in this field, read on, I believe you’ll find it interesting.
Sean Kennedy (middle) with Bill Westenhofer, Erik-Jan De Boer, & the visual effects Oscar for “Life of Pi”
“Our bottleneck has always been render power. Now, with RenderStreet One, the only bottleneck is our capacity to research and animate.”
—Marc Chehab
El Contexto
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.
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.
We’re starting our 2016 interview series with Zacharias Reinhardt who has been playing around creating Sci-Fi movies since he was a teenager. Now, at 26, he is a Blender Certified Trainer and, together with his brother Vincent, is the owner of the AgenZasBrothers agency.
As you will learn, Zacharias now puts his efforts mostly into tutoring—doing workshops, Blender video tutorials, in-house training for companies and even remote teaching. He has made more than 180 Blender tutorials which are free on YouTube. But Zach is also into doing his own films, and his project Repto108 is now in the pipeline. Read on for some cool answers from Zach.
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.
At the beginning of this year, I was recommending some of the best laptops for 3D rendering on the market. We’re now close to the end of the year, and in the meantime the hardware has been upgraded with new performance parts. Let’s see what they are, and which notebooks come with the new hardware at this moment.
Intel Skylake CPUs. The 6th generation Core CPU line from Intel has been released and it’s already available in some notebooks from major manufacturers. The CPU that will most likely replace the most popular part in performance notebooks (i7-4720HQ) is the i7-6700HQ. It offers roughly the same performance, but the 14nm process brings a better power profile so it will add a bit to the battery life. Expect to see the 6700HQ as a mainstream CPU in gaming/performance notebooks released starting with this fall.
Intel booth at CES 2015 —Source: Flickr.com
And once again @RenderStreet proves they have the best customer care ever. 🙂 #b3d
— Sebastian König (@s_koenig) December 1, 2015
The support from @RenderStreet is phenomenal. There is actually very few services that can match that. Except maybe Blender. 🙂 #b3d
— Sebastian König (@s_koenig) August 14, 2015
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.
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.
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:
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.
Professional or hobbyist, every 3D artist hates waiting for the renders to finish. This causes a continuous quest for finding the best solution to render faster and cheaper, which in turn generates countless pages of discussions in the forums, benchmark comparisons, and of course ‘versus’ debates.
I have answered questions on this subject quite a number of times – some of them general, some of them about specific hardware and some of them about our service. My past series of articles offered a bit of background info and some ideas about what to look at when comparing rendering solutions in general. Now, I’ll try to show a more specific use case: rendering at home or in a small office, versus using a professional farm (like RenderStreet).
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:
