Blender 2.5

Our build guru Gekko just put up a brand new batch of the Blender 2.56 rendering clients. This release should fix a number of issues related to libraries running on both 32bit and 64bit clients. A test session has been launched to oversee the update, but at least on our clients everything seems to be going fine. Please report any errors that you might experience!

Apply for traineeship position at Renderfarm.fi

Renderfarm.fi is now officially looking for a new trainee to fill the big funny boots that Olivier Romand left when he departed to his beloved France at the start of the year. The traineeship is to take place at the Laurea University of Applied Sciences' SID Networks laboratory in Espoo, Finland. We're located 15km from the center of Helsinki. In case any of you internationals would be seriously interested to come to Finland for a period (six months or who knows - even more), feel free to contact me and we can see if we can figure out something. You can see all related info in this forum thread.

Our resident build guru Gekko just uploaded the new Blender Renderfarm.fi v2.55 builds on to our website. The new build offers new functionality in the form of an interactive summary page that displays feedback on the status of the different settings - something that was only available in the console previously. You can download the latest version of the build from here. The rendering clients for v2.55 will hopefully be up by the end of the week.

The problem with Python insists and as of yet the Python devs have not shown much compassion for our cause. If you'd like to help us in getting this issue fixed (meaning that the uploader provided with the main branch of Blender would work directly without tweaks), please go tell the Python devs that you want this fixed. You can do so by logging on and writing a comment on this page. Thank you for your continued support guys!

Although Renderfarm.fi was not used in any way in the making of Sintel, I think that this piece of news is more than worth posting. As it stands, Sintel represents the culmination of over two years of work from the Blender Foundation, and in more ways than one the whole Blender development and user community. Being the third open movie (after Elephant's Dream and Big Buck Bunny) to be produced by the Blender Foundation, Sintel once again manages to set the par on what can be achieved using open source software.

These are exciting days in many ways for all of us volunteers as we're also getting our first open movies actually rendered. Although much smaller in scale when compared to Sintel, productions such as Final Destiny and Materia: The Awakening show that there's a real need for publicly distributed rendering. As every single rendered session and input helps us in taking Renderfarm.fi to a more mature state, the hopes that our volunteer community might some day actually render a frame or two for an open movie production by the Blender Foundation grow. Now until that day comes, let's watch Sintel over and over again ;). Here we go on Youtube: