AMDave
11-09-2011, 06:59 AM
Renderfarm.fi at Blender Conference 2011
It took me over a week to have the opportunity to sit down and write about our escapades at this year's Blender Conference. Let me start off by saying that if you missed it this year, do make sure you take the extra effort to travel to Amsterdam next year. The conference just seems to get better with each passing year. It's a blast to have the chance to sit down with all the people who you chat with on IRC all year long and talk about Blender - and other things.This year the focus of the conference was on presentations about professional uses for Blender. The Renderfarm.fi talk: "Renderfarm.fi: A year in review", lead by yours truly with technical backup from Jesse "Gekko" Kaukonen, was held on Sunday. We topics such as what we've been doing for the past year, what's new in the rev10 uploader and where we're headed to. Though the talk started with only about 50 people in the room, I think we ended at around a 100 which is a very nice number of Blenderheads. At the time I thought the talk went well, but I'm sure that when the videos emerge (hopefully by the end of the month) I'll again realize which important things I managed to leave out.
Blender Conference 2011 presentation: "Renderfarm.fi: A year in Review"The presentation went through how things work and gave some nice examples of succesful renders. The key points about our year and future are presented from slide 18 onwards. If you don't have Flash or you're otherwise too busy to read through the slides yourselves, here's things in a nutshell. Done: python script based clients, multi-threading, new uploader (v9), Done but not yet implemented: HDR support, Library support, Screensaver, Coming: Cycles support, cloud rendering and virtualization of clients.The biggest news regarding the future of our volunteer farm is undeniably the fact that we are now officially funded by the European Union through our participation in the SCI-BUS (SCIentific gateway Based User Support) project that is funded from the Funding Programme 7 Research Infrastructures programme. This funding has enabled me to hire Blender core developer Nathan "jesterKing" Letwory in to the role of lead developer for the next year. Jesse "Gekko" Kaukonen and BURP creator Janus "Jbk" Kristensen will continue with us as consultants. This sudden increase in developer firepower should mean that in a year from now Renderfarm.fi will truly be an exciting open source platform for solving rendering needs.Finally and as we were in Amsterdam with the whole Studio Lumikuu (http://www.lumikuu.com) team, it was time to start the hype for an up-and-coming original production that the studio is preparing. The production is probably going to mark a benchmark for the farm as we'll be putting the technology to the ultimate test. Can Renderfarm.fi handle a real professional studio grade production? Once the production on this begins we will release a screensaver through which you will be able to receive sneak peeks of not only the rendering side of things, but also concept art and photos. Hopefully Studio Lumikuu's adoption and embracing of open rendering will not go unnoticed and a lot more professional studios will start to think of the concept as a viable alternative to private rendering.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6049/6301558431_6c721c7962.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/renderfarmfi/6301558431/)Studio Lumikuu at Blender Conference 2011 (left to right): Nathan Letwory, Janne Karhu, Hannu Hoffrén, Mats Holmberg, Julius TuomistoLoads of cool stuff took place at the Blender Conference. For example, Delicode (http://www.delicode.fi) (a small two-man venture by Janne "jahka" Karhu and yours truly) also demonstrated the Microsoft Kinect based "Kinect see, Bunny do" demo (check out our old video here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECL76--wBLo)). This time I decided not to write a full report here as most of the best stuff was covered in the awesome article (http://dingto.org/?p=411) posted by Thomas "DingTo" Dinges. I will post the talk in another blog post as soon as it becomes available on Youtube. Meanwhile check out our official Renderfarm.fi Flickr photo album (http://www.flickr.com/photos/renderfarmfi/sets/72157627901970037/) for photos from Amsterdam.PS. In case you are visiting FSCONS (http://fscons.org/) (Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit) next weekend in Göteborg, Sweden, please do find me. I will be there representing Laurea UAS, Renderfarm.fi and Studio Lumikuu. I will be showing off a preview of the up-and-coming "BBB explains Creative Commons" video we've been creating for the past two months. Naturally you can see parts of the video rendered in the gallery! :)
More... (http://renderfarm.fi/blog/prodigalson/blender-conference-2011-sci-bus)
It took me over a week to have the opportunity to sit down and write about our escapades at this year's Blender Conference. Let me start off by saying that if you missed it this year, do make sure you take the extra effort to travel to Amsterdam next year. The conference just seems to get better with each passing year. It's a blast to have the chance to sit down with all the people who you chat with on IRC all year long and talk about Blender - and other things.This year the focus of the conference was on presentations about professional uses for Blender. The Renderfarm.fi talk: "Renderfarm.fi: A year in review", lead by yours truly with technical backup from Jesse "Gekko" Kaukonen, was held on Sunday. We topics such as what we've been doing for the past year, what's new in the rev10 uploader and where we're headed to. Though the talk started with only about 50 people in the room, I think we ended at around a 100 which is a very nice number of Blenderheads. At the time I thought the talk went well, but I'm sure that when the videos emerge (hopefully by the end of the month) I'll again realize which important things I managed to leave out.
Blender Conference 2011 presentation: "Renderfarm.fi: A year in Review"The presentation went through how things work and gave some nice examples of succesful renders. The key points about our year and future are presented from slide 18 onwards. If you don't have Flash or you're otherwise too busy to read through the slides yourselves, here's things in a nutshell. Done: python script based clients, multi-threading, new uploader (v9), Done but not yet implemented: HDR support, Library support, Screensaver, Coming: Cycles support, cloud rendering and virtualization of clients.The biggest news regarding the future of our volunteer farm is undeniably the fact that we are now officially funded by the European Union through our participation in the SCI-BUS (SCIentific gateway Based User Support) project that is funded from the Funding Programme 7 Research Infrastructures programme. This funding has enabled me to hire Blender core developer Nathan "jesterKing" Letwory in to the role of lead developer for the next year. Jesse "Gekko" Kaukonen and BURP creator Janus "Jbk" Kristensen will continue with us as consultants. This sudden increase in developer firepower should mean that in a year from now Renderfarm.fi will truly be an exciting open source platform for solving rendering needs.Finally and as we were in Amsterdam with the whole Studio Lumikuu (http://www.lumikuu.com) team, it was time to start the hype for an up-and-coming original production that the studio is preparing. The production is probably going to mark a benchmark for the farm as we'll be putting the technology to the ultimate test. Can Renderfarm.fi handle a real professional studio grade production? Once the production on this begins we will release a screensaver through which you will be able to receive sneak peeks of not only the rendering side of things, but also concept art and photos. Hopefully Studio Lumikuu's adoption and embracing of open rendering will not go unnoticed and a lot more professional studios will start to think of the concept as a viable alternative to private rendering.
http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6049/6301558431_6c721c7962.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/renderfarmfi/6301558431/)Studio Lumikuu at Blender Conference 2011 (left to right): Nathan Letwory, Janne Karhu, Hannu Hoffrén, Mats Holmberg, Julius TuomistoLoads of cool stuff took place at the Blender Conference. For example, Delicode (http://www.delicode.fi) (a small two-man venture by Janne "jahka" Karhu and yours truly) also demonstrated the Microsoft Kinect based "Kinect see, Bunny do" demo (check out our old video here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECL76--wBLo)). This time I decided not to write a full report here as most of the best stuff was covered in the awesome article (http://dingto.org/?p=411) posted by Thomas "DingTo" Dinges. I will post the talk in another blog post as soon as it becomes available on Youtube. Meanwhile check out our official Renderfarm.fi Flickr photo album (http://www.flickr.com/photos/renderfarmfi/sets/72157627901970037/) for photos from Amsterdam.PS. In case you are visiting FSCONS (http://fscons.org/) (Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit) next weekend in Göteborg, Sweden, please do find me. I will be there representing Laurea UAS, Renderfarm.fi and Studio Lumikuu. I will be showing off a preview of the up-and-coming "BBB explains Creative Commons" video we've been creating for the past two months. Naturally you can see parts of the video rendered in the gallery! :)
More... (http://renderfarm.fi/blog/prodigalson/blender-conference-2011-sci-bus)