BlenderRenders Announces Improved Workflow

[blenderrenders]

Hello everyone,

I thought I would announce here that we have completely re-vamped our LuxRender workflow to make it easier to manage LuxRender slave machines (LuxMachines) running within our farm.

Here's our announcement on blenderrenders.com so you can see the details at your convenience, but I'll hit the high points here.

1. You still turn machines on and off simply.
2. Instead of using the network rendering built into LuxRender, you can upload your files to our ftp area.
3. Point your luxmachines to your lxs file and watch the FLM and PNG spit out.
4. Turn machines off when you like what you see or point them to other lxs files to process other scenes.

Another cool thing here is that we output an FLM, so if you want to have 5 or 6 machines render the same lxs, go for it. When you're done, you can download all the FLMs and merge them yourself, or you can merge them on our site and download just a single FLM. It's up to you.

Each machine is still a full 20GHz/8GB RAM for just a dollar an hour.

We're excited to include LuxRender in our service and have worked very hard to improve our functionality after working with our customers over the past few months. Please do not hesitate to contact me and I can personally help you get started with our new features.

Thanks,
Aaron Kammerer

PS We are happy to award the 4th place prize for the Simple is Beautiful competition to Aaron Solo. His entry was fantastic!

[J the Ninja]

Wow, this is a big improvement over the old workflow, which always felt more tailored to BI (seemed to expect a number of quick jobs). This seems like the same way we generally pass files around when the multiple forum members are helping to render a scene. Good to know there are some virtual render blades for rent with that technique now. I'll keep this in mind for next time I'm on a deadline with a big still.

[zeealpal]

Great service

Nice speeds too my 3.3 GHz i5 (Quad Core) got ~161 KC/s while one BlenderRender slave got me ~298 kC/s

Or for my test scene: My PC: 29.44 kS/s compared to 137 kS/s from 3 slaves (45.6 kS/s)

[Lord Crc]

That's great news! Thanks for the work!

[SATtva]

Very nice!

[B.Y.O.B.]

Very good, will test it soon. I hope the ftp upload works now...

[zeealpal]

Very good, will test it soon. I hope the ftp upload works now...

It works for me The FLM merge and everything, just used 7 machines on one scene, better result in one hour than 11 hours of my pc :/

Question, does embed file data pack textures etc into the scene file/folder?

Because that would make this really easy.

[SATtva]

Me too can only commend on the new workflow, works nicely. And support is very responsive and helpful too, which is a big plus.

[B.Y.O.B.]

Hi,
I'm testing the new service at the moment (the network rendering) and it's working really good.
The CPU seems to be a little bit faster than my Phenom II X6@2.8GHz (223kS/s > 208kS/s) and the file transport over the internet is working fine, too (I have a 250kb-downstream-connection (DSL)).

My congratulations to this easy workflow