Redesigning our website [*spoiler alert]

      News

RenderStreet was launched in Oct 2012 in Closed Beta with this bold announcement on BlenderArtists forum. After the service was tested and refined with the help of this great community, we launched it publicly, in February 2013.

This past year we put all our efforts into making RenderStreet a cutting edge rendering machine, keeping pace with Blender releases, increasing the computational power of the rendering farm and being close to our customers.

Today, we want our brand identity and website design to represent our solution that has turned to be one of the best on this market. RenderStreet must align its looks to its value – The next generation render farm for Blender.

Header

READ MORE

3D images, rendered with RenderStreet, in 2013

      Blender, Rendered with RenderStreet

In 2013 we had over 10.000 Blender projects that ran through our farm. They are all private work and most of them were never exposed publicly. But some are out there, on the world wide web. Here is a collection of some cool 3D images rendered with RenderStreet, publicly released by our clients.

The beautiful image Morning at the farmhouse made by Richard Hoatland. Rendered with Cycles, 1500 samples. Took about 1,25 hrs to complete with RenderStreet.

Moring at the farmhouse

READ MORE

RenderStreet – 2013 in figures

      Blender, Rendered with RenderStreet, News

Welcome to 2014!

At RenderStreet we are constantly looking into our performance indicators, as they allow us to monitor our service’s health and performance. And because you are at the center of all our efforts, we wanted to share with you a few of those indicators.

Here are some stats for Blender renders on our farm:

  • 99.91% service uptime. We only had seven hours service downtime since our launch, out of which 5 hours were scheduled updates. And our service has been running during the holidays too – we even had a project rendering between the years. 
  • Over 10,000 jobs, with a 98% success rate in job delivery. This means only 2% of the jobs had errors that prevented rendering from being completed. We worked with most of the respective clients to get their projects to render as well.
  • 87% of the animations rendered on our farm were delivered in under 72 minutes. That’s pretty impressive, considering that we had some significant workloads to render.
  • Highest acceleration for a project, compared to the client’s machine: 51,429%, or 514 times faster. Meaning 3.5 hours instead of 2.5 months for an animation.
READ MORE

Launching RenderStreet for Artists program

      News

A great event may be measured by the ideas and projects it generates. For us, Blender Conference was the place where we came up with a way to help Blender community develop.

We are officially launching the RenderStreet for Artists sponsorship program in which we will provide selected projects with free rendering on our servers.

The only requirement for applicants is that their project is open and all the resources are made available for anyone to use. It may be an animation film, a 3D image, whatever you decide to work on that needs fast rendering.

READ MORE

RenderStreet at its second Startup Spotlight competition @ How to Web 2013

      News

On 20-21st of November, all the tech scene of Central and Eastern Europe was in Bucharest, attending How to Web event, organized by Bogdan Iordache and his team. RenderStreet was selected, among other 32 finalists, to take part in the Startup Spotlight competition, a valuable experience taking us closer to the next stages of our business.

How to Web is dedicated to the online tech industry, with keynotes from company CEOs, investors, serial entrepreneurs, start-up accelerator officials, designers, web journalists and we’ve never missed any edition, since 2009.

READ MORE

Caminandes Grand Dillama – the first open animation movie rendered with RenderStreet

      Rendered with RenderStreet, News

Besides running a serious business, we love watching well animated cartoons. And when Blender Institute released the first episode of Caminandes, we knew we wanted to back them up.

We allocated 50 some pro-bono servers and we gave Pablo Vazquez and his team our full support for rendering the next llama adventures. For the last month, our servers have been busy with Cycle rendering Caminandes Grand Dillama scenes. Amazingly, one day after the upload, it got over 20k views on YouTube:

READ MORE

Preparing for How to Web. And Startup Spotlight competition!

      News

Even if our service is up and running for almost a full year now, business wise, we are constantly looking for development opportunities and exploring strategies to enrich RenderStreet on all levels. This small intro is meant to prepare some good news: RenderStreet is a finalist in the Startup Spotlight competition, part of the How to Web event.

fb-cover-startupspotlight-finalist (1)

READ MORE

Sparkling moments from Blender Conference

      News

We just got back from the Blender Conference in Amsterdam. It was an impressive show, with lots of engaging presentations and many talks you could learn from. The overall atmosphere was very close to the Blender spirit: open source style, a bit chaotic, but kept on track and delivering good content.

Marius Iatan and Sorin Vinatoru, founders of RenderStreet among other participants at the Blender Conference.

Marius Iatan and Sorin Vinatoru, founders of RenderStreet, among other participants at the Blender Conference. Cheers guys!

READ MORE

Best Cloud Service Start-Up nomination for RenderStreet at EuroCloud 2013

      News

As winner of the Romanian Best Cloud Startup award, RenderStreet participated in the European contest for the Best European Cloud Startup organised at the EuroCloud Congress and was a runner-up for the title.

With over 300 industry and government experts from 23 EU states and around the world, the EuroCloud Congress is the place to be for learning about new developments in the cloud industry.

RenderStreet nomination

RenderStreet was finalist for Best Cloud Services Startup at the EuroCloud Congress 2013. Image source

READ MORE

Blender plugin available on all platforms

      News

Our Blender plugin is now available for all platforms. This means you can use it in Windows, MacOSX and Linux, with Blender 2.67 or newer. After installing it, you will be able to send renders to our farm and check their status, all from Blender’s interface. The plugin handles the file upload to our farm in a secure way, and launches the render automatically. It also displays a list of your recent jobs, and you can click in the list to open the job page and download the files.

READ MORE

Blender 2.69 RC1 is up

      News

blender-269RC1-splashBlender 2.69 RC1 has been put up by the Foundation about 3 days ago, so we started working on having it available on our farm as well. This didn’t take long and the new version is available on our farm right now.

Please note that this is a release candidate, so it might contain bugs. Use it on your own risk, and for testing purposes only.

READ MORE

Meet us in Amsterdam, at the Blender conference

      Blender

blender-conference-2013

Both Sorin and Marius will be in Amsterdam between October 24th and October 29th, attending the Blender conference there. Marius will also take part in the panel about commercializing, where he will present our challenges and accomplishments in working with Blender in a commercial environment.

If you happen to be at the conference this year, send us an email, or leave a comment below. We’ll love to meet you in person and have a chat.

 

New Job and File retention policy

      News

It’s been more than 6 months since we launched our live service and things are going well. We rendered a lot of jobs in the past 6 months, and at this point we need to introduce a file and job retention policy, so we do not store your files on our servers longer than needed.

To this extent, we have elaborated the following retention policy. We will keep the jobs and files for a set amount of time, depending on the membership level.

READ MORE

An easier way to add jobs

      News

new interface

Since launch, we have collected feedback from you regarding the job management interface. We have slightly refined the interface in time, based on this feedback. But one of the major pain points was the inability to tweak the project parameters without uploading the file again. And sometimes these files can get very large. We listened to the feedback and I am happy to announce a major update to the job submission interface.

READ MORE

Architecture Academy trailer rendered with us

      Rendered with RenderStreet

I am happy to announce that BlenderGuru’s new course intro materials have been rendered on RenderStreet. It was my pleasure to welcome Andrew among our customers and see the awesome renders he created for his course.

Below are a couple of images reproduced with permission from Architecture Academy’s website. More pictures here, check it out for more goodies rendered on RenderStreet.

The Architecture Academy registration will be open until 17th July 4PM GMT, so hurry up and grab your seat.

ArchAcademy-Oakville-WideArchAcademy-Coffee-Table-Close2

Blender 2.68 RC1 available now

      Blender

Blender 2.68 RC1 has been released by the Blender Foundation a couple weeks ago. We have finally managed to add that to our farm, so you can send your projects using this version as well. It took us a bit of time to add it because it uses a different CUDA version and we ran into compatibility issues with it. All that was fixed in the end and I am happy to have this live.

The most expected feature in this release is the ability to render cycles hair on GPU. So the projects that use hair will no longer have to be rendered on CPU machines, and will be able to benefit from the GPU speedup.

To illustrate the GPU speedup, I took BlenderGuru’s Sintel file and rendered the same image with 2.67b and 2.68 RC1. 2.67b (image on the left) was rendered on CPU, 2.68 RC1 (on the right) was rendered on GPU. The times  look like this:

  • CPU: 51 minutes 
  • GPU: 43 minutes (16% faster)

BlenderGuru_Sintel_CPU

BlenderGuru_Sintel_GPU

 

 

 

 

A second test we did involves only hair (see image below). Here are the times for it:

  • CPU: 5:22 minutes
  • GPU: 4:46 minutes (12% faster)

My conclusion is that, even though it’s faster to render the hair on GPU, the gain in performance is not as much as expected. This might be because we have very powerful CPU servers. Likely the gain on a lower power desktop computer will be higher than this.

hair ball

Have you rendered anything interesting with 2.68? Post it in the comments.