Otaverkko

I'm pleased to report that Gekko and Jbk have successfully migrated our main file system. The move, made possible by continued support from Laurea UAS and our wonderful ISP (and now sponsor) Otaverkko, ensures that we will be able to grow in the future. Because we don't have to worry about filling the file system anymore, it should also mean that we'll be able to react more quickly to oncoming sessions. Three cheers to Gekko, Jbk and Otaverkko!

Moving on to something even more exciting, I'm glad to announce that we will be getting a host of new features in the upcoming weeks. Some of you might have been waiting for an upgrade to Blender 2.58 (especially as we've always been pretty much the first renderfarm to handle updates as 2.5 has progressed). I'll give you the bad news first: You'll have to wait a little longer. The good news? Well there's a lot. Gekko (with some help from Jesterking) is working on a completely new way to implement the rendering process at the client end. This process, though it will take some weeks to develop, will ultimately mean a much leaner process for both us and your rendering clients. It will also make some of the features that we've built in to the uploader redundant, meaning we can actually simplify the upload procedure even further.

Thought that's all? Well it's not. I have something even more exciting to announce. Thanks largely to Jbk's efforts on the BURP core, we are now entering a stage where Renderfarm.fi is able to offer library support. Though already available in the back-end, we still need to implement a good way to handle this from the user's perspective. To be honest, I don't expect the first implementation of this to be the most intuitive or dynamic. Regardless, I do believe I'm quite right in saying that once implemented successfully, Renderfarm.fi will most likely be the first Blender supporting renderfarm on the Internet to offer such a feature to it's users.

Feature wise, once fully implemented, library support means we will be able to offer professional production studios and larger productions the possibility to upload their libraries as assets to the farm. Once downloaded the rendering on any single participating client can happen in reference to the library files. This means that those same assets (textures, models etc.) will no longer need to be baked in to the .blend file and the 300MB per session limit that we currently implement will no longer be a problem. In fact, suddenly it will be possible to ask the client to download 1,5 GB of libraries once and then just download a couple of megabytes of scene data per rendered session.

Because there are definitely clients out there that cannot or do not want to download 1,5 GB of libraries in order to participate (no matter how cool the movie or project might be), we'll aim to make it possible for clients to opt out of supporting libraries. Anyway, this is sure to be a feature that all the serious productions and studios out there will love.

That's it for now. Much more to come this summer. Trust me. :)

PS. We're up to an unbelievable 4600 registered users! That's an increase of 1600 in just two months. Thank you all for your support!

Although many of you have probably noticed this already (either from reading my personal blog entry from last night or then by wondering on to the Server Status page), we're back in action. Our back-end is receiving and distributing work units as per normal, even while the web frontend will require some more work to get to the state where it was before the crash.

However, there's an important note to all new registrants: the server is currently not sending in your validation email. We know of this and will send your emails to you after the weekend. Thank you for your patience!

I'm going to meet up with the ISP Otaverkko during the week to get us more diskspace and a good back-up plan for the future. So this episode will hopefully not repeat itself anymore in the future. Meanwhile, I'd like to thank the dynamic duo of Janus Kristensen (BURP guru) and Olivier Romand (Renderfarm.fi main developer) for their hard work. A big cheers also to Otaverkko, where we had to visit twice - both times after hours (great service policy I tell you).

Renderfarm.fi

From the left: Janus Kristensen, Olivier Romand, Tuomo Karhapää (Otaverkko)
in front of the Otaverkko main offices in Espoo, Finland