How does Renderfarm.fi Work?

I'm happy to say that this year I'll be representing Renderfarm.fi at both the Game Developers Conference (San Francisco, California) and South by Southwest (Austin, Texas). In case you're heading to either of these two great venues, please do seek me out! At GDC you can find me best at the Finnish section of the Nordic Pavilion (North Hall, booth 1824), while at SXSW you can find me best from the stand of the Finnish Mobile Association (stands 1123, 1125). In case you do get to either venue you can pick up your copy of the free and now classic Renderfarm.fi poster "Join the Blender Army", proven to also be hanging on the walls of great studios like the Blender Institute and Energia:

We'll be having a get together for Blender users at the Game Developers Conference on Thursday the 8th of March. Let's meet up at around 2PM at the Nordic Pavilion (North Hall, booth 1824) and move on from there if necessary. Similar meet up could be held at SXSW if enough Blenderheads show an interest. I know of at least two IRC #blender regulars who will be attending GDC with me, so the meeting's going to happen in any case. If you're there or even if you aren't but know of some Blenderhead who will - let them know!

We are extremely proud to announce that Renderfarm.fi might well be the first renderfarm on the planet to have successfully implemented distributed rendering for Blender's new awesome render engine Cycles. Although still at a preliminary testing phase, most of the difficult work is now behind us. We've created proof of concept that our method of splitting and computing work in to small sample sets, collecting them and combining them into a high quality and high resolution finish on the server side works. Here's Nathan's test render from yesterday that proves our case, the image on the right is the result of merging 100 21-sample images together, in effect creating a 2100-sample image:

The first session to apply this new technology is now running. As Cycles is in early beta for us, all Cycles sessions will be running on a small subset of computers. If you would like to help us in testing, please get in contact with Gekko on this forum thread. Similarly we would We would also now like to invite artists to send us some us some ultra realistic scenes, computationally intensive that they would like to see rendered as tests on Renderfarm.fi. If you have any, please get in contact on the same forum post or find us on on IRC Freenode #Renderfarm.fi! Three cheers for Blender!

Last spring I wrote a script that I hoped would transmit the important values that Creative Commons stands for in a funny but informative way. I wrote the original draft with the aim of explaining the six basic Creative Commons licenses Renderfarm.fi supports, but after applying for and receiving a small grant from the Cloudberry fund, I went on to write a story aimed at promoting Creative Commons both in the Nordic region and the rest of the world. This became the script for "BBB loves CC", a short film production that we release today.

I personally feel that Big Buck Bunny and the rest of his Blender Foundation colleagues represent a new chapter in an art form that is as probably as old as speech itself: storytelling. When creative materials are released under Creative Commons and other open licenses, people are free to take those stories to new directions and make up their own where they feel like. This freedom is where endless possibility lies in terms of the story. Fan art thrives, new stories emerge and characters are "kept alive" for generations - not for the love of money, but for the love of the characters and stories themselves.

Obviously not all characters have what it takes to survive in a world packed with information and in constant transition. Some do. Perhaps the most loved Creative Commons character to date is Big Buck Bunny. We have had the pleasure to work with him (notice the wording, we do not "use" him, that would be just wrong!) in many previous Studio Lumikuu productions (including Renderfarm.fi's very own "What is Renderfarm.fi?" video). It was indeed clear to us from the start that there was only one bunny big enough to pull off this enormous task!

Please note that even though this video is aimed at encouraging people to use Creative Commons, we will not force you to do so here on Renderfarm.fi. Ultimately big decisions like this should always be left for the artist to decide. Still we feel that if you can afford it, using Creative Commons is a sure way to gain that many more loyal followers. Anyway, without further due, we'll let The Bunny (as in The Dude) do the talking from now in the Renderfarm.fi/Studio Lumikuu production "BBB loves CC":