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.
To put some meat behind the words, we searched for the relevant numbers from the rendering activity on our farm in 2015. Here are the ones that will give you a peek on what we’ve been doing:
- 99.994% uptime. This means just 33 minutes downtime in the entire year (measured by an independent service). It’s our yearly uptime record so far, and we’re proud of it!
- Over 27,000 jobs, with a 99.5% success rate in job delivery. Only 0.5% of the jobs had issues that prevented them from being successfully finished. Again, an improvement over the next year, and it becomes harder and harder to fight for every tenth of a percent. What the number means is that for an almost double number of jobs compared with last year, we managed to keep the problems at the same level in absolute figures. Anyone ever having to deliver a service will know what this means in terms of effort. Big kudos to the team for the accomplishment!
- 1.6 million frames rendered on RenderStreet One since the program launch in February 2015. Quite a success for our flat-fee rendering alternative.
- 82% of the animations were delivered in under 62 minutes in average. A significant improvement over the last year, we blame it on the new quad GPU servers we added this year. This number was compiled from the on-demand job history.
- Our busiest day: the equivalent of 296 days of rendering on the most powerful MacBook Pro from the current generation (with 2.80GHz Core i7 CPU). In a 24 hours interval. Why compare to MacBook Pro? Because it seems to be the weapon of choice for the road warrior artist these days.
Projects rendered on RenderStreet this year that that caught our eye:
- Longest animation rendered as a single job: 31,800 frames. Yep, that’s 22 full minutes in one shot, with just one mouse click.
- Max GPU servers allocated simultaneously to a single project: 180. Anyone else imagining their animation crunching on the equivalent power of 360 Titan cards?
- Cutest animation rendered: Caminandes 3 (yeah, you caught us, we have a thing for Koro)
- Biggest image rendered: 3,317,760,000 pixels, or 76,800 x 43,200 px. Gotta love our split function for still images—renders this size wouldn’t be possible without it!
It’s been a full year, and we achieved most of the things on our list. I’d like to thank all of you for being our customers and for trusting us with your work. We know how important it is for you to know that you can deliver projects of any size and still make the deadline. We also know that a lot of artists and studios are at the beginning of the journey, and I’d like to restate our support for that journey. And as always, if there is something you think we could help with, drop us a line, we may be able to do it.
Looking ahead, we have a list of things that will be added to our service this year. Our dev team has quite a full dance card, but we’ll still hear your suggestions and squeeze them in if we can.
Welcome to 2016!
Marius Iatan
CEO, RenderStreet
PS. If you are interested in the rendering numbers for last two years, you can see them here: 2014 and 2013.
