About Renderfarm.fi

Make sure you are also familiar with both our policies, terms of use and output licensing. For any technology related questions, you can consult the Renderfarm.fi FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and the Forum.

If you represent the press or are just interested in promoting the community (for example by thanking us by placing our logo in your credits), go to the Media and Press information page.

What is Renderfarm.fi? (also available in )

Renderfarm.fi is the most accessible distributed rendering platform on the Internet. It is – and always will be - a completely free service that enables its users to render their animations or stills by using the computing power of volunteers from around the world. Renderfarm.fi encourages everybody to take part in both the online community and the collaborative rendering. We also advocate open licensing (Creative Commons), open values and sharing of resources over geographic borders.

Are you an animator? By using Renderfarm.fi, 3D artists and animators benefit from being able to use higher image quality and higher resolutions when rendering. By dividing the work among hundreds of volunteer computers, an animation that takes months to render on single machine can be completed in a matter of days.

Are you a volunteer? Renderfarm.fi enables its users to participate in the rendering of stills and animations, regardless of whether or not they themselves are able to or even interested in learning about 3D modeling and animation. The stills and animations created can then later become parts of a movie that the users have helped to create.

For a quick briefing to the whole subject check out the cool "What is Renderfarm.fi?" video featuring the Blender Foundation's much-loved character Big Buck Bunny from our official Youtube channel:

Bridging the Digital Gap: Why should you volunteer?

The wide spread use of CGI also means that today’s movie audiences, be they at the theatre or lying down on their living room couch, are not easy to satisfy. This means that movies being developed on a low budget are far stretched to compete with the visuals that big budget movies boast. In fact, in this it seems that while the advancement of digital technology has bridged gaps, it has also introduced new ones.

We believe that the cultural movement represented by community based services like Renderfarm.fi, best described as the democratization of media, should be embraced. Simply by volunteering your computer to compute for Renderfarm.fi you can be a part of this movement. We're making Renderfarm.fi as accessible as possible and enabling as many people as possible to both take part in and use the technologies behind the service. In order to reach our goal for total accessibility, we've chosen to support Blender, the world's most popular open source 3D suite. Supporting Blender means that we can reach out to everybody on equal ground.

As new services are bringing people together in new ways and empowering individuals to be creative and to be heard, regardless of their background, the combination of Blender and Renderfarm.fi enables almost anybody - whether a poor student from Asia or the owner of a large animation studio in the US - to create professional level 3D stills and animation. Renderfarm.fi and the project that originally made it possible, BURP, could be recognized as rare exceptions among a plethora of BOINC projects because no lengthy analysis or scientific know-how is necessary to understand the images and movie clips that are produced. They speak their own universal language.

The Technology: Openness is a state of mind

The development of open source technologies such as GPL-licensed Blender and the LGPL-licensed BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) made the creation of BURP (Big and Ugly Rendering Project) viable. The BURP software, originally created by Janus Kristensen and now developed in co-operation between Kristensen and the Renderfarm.fi team, is an open source project developing software for doing publicly distributed rendering of computer generated 3D animations and stills. BURP is free software distributed under the GNU GPL v3 license.

Openness is a state of mind. Renderfarm.fi and the technologies behind it make rendered animations and images public. In an effort to offer a completely transparent service, we will never obfuscate or encrypt any of the renders that get done on the service. People who feel uncomfortable with this will probably never use this service. Meanwhile, the more open minded of us are likely to embrace this opportunity to share our extra resources with other people hoping realize their full potential as artists.

Awards and Press Acknowledgement