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.
“File Output” nodes output capturing
This feature has been requested by our customers for some time. What is does is capturing the files generated by the “file output” compositor nodes. When you have such nodes in your compositor, we get the files they output and put them in the job archive (the one you can access via the “download all” link).
In order to benefit from this feature, you only have to make sure you use relative paths in the “base path” field in the node. We will then collect the files it will output and add them automatically to the render archive. All you have to do at the end of the render is to download this archive.
FLM file for LuxRender renders
This is a great feature for those of you rendering LuxRender projects. With the FLM file, you can now adjust all the parameters you were used to adjust in LuxRender.
You can also use this feature, together with our farm, to accelerate the render times a lot for still images. Here’s how to do it:
- Upload a .blend file with “Halt time” set to one hour
- Decide how much you would like to render. Let’s say you need 5 hours.
- Create a job with 5 frames. 5 being the number determined above
- Launch the job
When doing this, we will spawn automatically the job on 5 servers and run it in parallel, so instead of taking 5 hours, it will only take one. In the download archive, you’ll get 5 FLM files that can be merged using the luxmerge application.
Faster download speed
I know many of you render large animations. Those can add up to take a lot of space and generate large downloads. Since we wanted you to have faster access to these files and not be limited by the currently available download speed, we implemented a faster download method, that will improve the speed you are getting the files at by a factor of 3 or more.
While the project is rendered, you will still have the up to date archive available, at the normal download speed. Once the job is finished, after a few minutes (depending on your project size), you’ll see the icon near the “Download all” link change to indicate the fast download is available. Once that shows, clicking the “download all” link will get your render archive via the faster method.
How are these update working for you? Please let me know in the comments below.
