It’s the beginning of a new decade, and the numerologists are probably busy all over the world drawing hidden meanings from the 2020 number. In the meantime, in our office, part of the job is analyzing last year’s activity in order to build a better version of ourselves for the year to come.
2019 was the 5-year anniversary of our monthly plan RenderStreet One. With over 37 million frames rendered so far for artists, studios and students around the world, I’m glad to see that our efforts paid off and we were able to maintain a low-cost, dependable rendering solution for the Blender and Modo communities. It’s an option that makes rendering affordable for a lot of people that wouldn’t be able to use a render farm otherwise. And it accomplishes this without having to compromise: your projects don’t leave our infrastructure, everything remains fully private and confidential, and the plan is backed up by our tech support. Having a good rendering solution is important for an artist because it can go a long way to help improve their artistic and personal development. And this is, in fact, our end goal. So this one is a clear ‘win’ for everybody 🙂
The past year has also been marked by our work on important technology upgrades for RenderStreet. The new interface, that we’ve been developing for a while, is almost ready to launch. In fact, some of you are already using it, and we appreciate the feedback you are providing. Everything has been re-written from scratch, and the new technology has made it possible to update the Blender plug-in as well. The new plugin is easier to install and has faster, trouble-free, uploads. You can download it now for Blender 2.80 and newer.
The second important upgrade we’ve been working on is an infrastructure one. This will open a number of possibilities, from nearshore upload and download locations for geographical zones to greater flexibility regarding our storage arrays and even to private storage on dedicated machines for studio accounts if needed! This is almost completed as well, so you’ll be able to benefit from it really soon.
In parallel with that, we’ve kept our incremental updates pace. Small things, like being able to support various color profiles in Blender 2.80 and higher. Or optimized Eevee rendering for faster, cheaper delivery of projects. Or a gazillion other small things that have been added or optimized in both the front-end and the back-end, to make the entire operation even smoother.
The numbers for the past year are also looking good: even with an increase of over 50% in the total hours rendered across all our plans (One, On-Demand and Studio), both our delivery rates and our availability have remained in the upper 99%. Another win, which makes me state the following:
RenderStreet is a dependable, predictable service for your renders. It works, and it works well. And, if you’re a client, we always have your back, no matter the project size. I know I’ve said this before, and I’m proud to say it again. We are committed to staying at the forefront of rendering technology. In order to do that, we are continuously working to make our platform better, faster and at the same time easier to use and offering better value for your dollar.
Keep close for the release date of the new features – the ones I mentioned here, and the others we have in the development pipeline! 2020 is going to be an exciting year, and I’ll be happy to have you close to us!
Marius Iatan
CEO, RenderStreet
