Oct

Render Street – our friendly render farm

Hi, I’m back to work! It has been a long hot summer on the playground.. but while I was doing Mommy stuff others have been busy.

I’m proudly presenting Render Street, an online farm project I’m part of. The other part is my husband Sorin and his partner Marius. From his desk positioned next to mine in our home, Sorin has watched me struggle several times, trying to use a couple of online render services to be able to finish projects on schedule. While I was mumbling annoyed words about uploading being a mess and render times too slow he said “wait, we could easily do something like this that would work!”.

I think the “easily” part was not too accurate as they worked a lot since then. They are really experienced programmers with lot of work between them as a team but they had not so much experience with Blender, with all the releases in use, with the different render engines. Particles and baking fluids gave them a hard time too. I tested and helped them on the way as their own in-house (literally) blenderhead.

Now that things seem under control the website is launched, it is in beta stage and looking for testers willing to apply and help with some feedback, and Marius posted on Blender Artists an invitation for the Blender community:

Invitation

I am thanking in advance those who would like to try it. You can send feedback any route, on the Render Street page, BA thread or on Blendermama.

Support of the latest Blender version 2.64 is being added really soon.

Categories : Blender stuff, News, Rendering, Workflow

Ray Tungsteen

Hey Oana, long time no “see”! It’s great that you have been busy launching a very worthwhile enterprise. I’m sure you and the lads will go from strength to strength.

Some feedback. First, I’m not in your target market as I’ve just obtained a solution using the same resources 😉 so no need for me to use your service.

* Please proofread the site, there are small errors, mostly misspelling and missing spaces. This matters, and since your English is just about perfect, you can do it. (“Intenssive” is Intensive, “cardt” should be “cards”, etc., small stuff).
* I can’t make sense of your price list, you might want to look at making it clearer. How does price per Ghz hour or CPU core relate to number of servers? Perhaps your control panel makes the calculation clear, but I think it still would be nice for first time visitors to be able to quickly work out the pricing before signing up.
* Security needs to be addressed. One of the reasons I have my own solution rather than using a render farm is that I don’t trust others with my work. (By others I mean people running render farm businesses, not the underlying resource.) So, think HTTPS and SSL and “we can’t see your files unless you ask us to troubleshoot” – some kind of security policy and reassurance along those lines.
* Which leads us neatly to, you need a Legal page.

All in all, an excellent initiative that will do well, you seem like a good and committed team, working in a growing market. Not everyone can devise their own solution, you provide good solid “value added”.
Ray Tungsteen

Sorry, ignore the Legal page bit, I see you have “Terms and conditions”. Should have read properly before posting! 🙂
Oana

Hi Ray 🙂 Glad to know you are still watching! I hate making such long pauses but… well.. it happens but still I don’t want to quit blogging. My kid just started kindergarten so this could mean some more work time for me.
Thanks for the feedback, I forwarded it to the team. They were thankful for your pointers too, and also wonder how your solution looks 😉 Would you mind sharing some more detail on this, here, or writing to me on my adress oana at colorstudio.ro?
I totally agree with the security thing, that should be addressed, I’ll ask Sorin about it. At the present time I think it’s just “your work is secure with us, because we are good sort”! but I can understand this might not be enough to someone who never went to drinks with us and wants to use a professional service. For the same reason I didn’t get to use renderfarm.fi though it sounds like a great idea, but working for clients I had to consider the safety and privacy issue.
Ray Tungsteen

Oana – I’ll reply here as I don’t really have much to offer. My own solution is as basic as I could get away with, considering I’m not a programmer. I only do stills, not animation. So this is a collection of a few scripts – Python for Blender and Bash for the computers – to slice the blend file into tiles (on the server, so only one file is to be uploaded), send the slices to the computers, call a script on them to render, which then sends the result back to the master computer. I then reassemle into final picture with ImageMagick and download to my PC. The whole thing is semi-automatic, no control panel, run with commands in the Terminal. I’m happy, but it obviously isn’t something that could be released for others to use. That’s why I think you’re on to a good thing – most people won’t be able to create even what I cobbled together, let alone a truly robust and professional solution. I hope that answers the question though I’m positive what your team are doing is way more advanced, as it has to be.

Once again, good luck, wishing you much success! 🙂
Oana

Thanks Ray! Marius and Sorin read your answer and nodded their heads in approval 🙂 Really cool!
also.. a spellcheck was performed on the site, thanks 😉
I must say, I have to use spellcheck always for my posts, I always get something wrong…
Alain

I’ve tested many Renderservices for Blender, but Render Street is the first that worked really well. Better than RenderFlow 🙂

Kind regards
Alain
Oana

That’s very good news Alain 🙂 Thank you for trying it out and posting. Should get even better, as the team is still hard at work on improving it.

Render Street – our friendly render farm

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