Studio Lumikuu

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":

It took me over a week to have the opportunity to sit down and write about our escapades at this year's Blender Conference. Let me start off by saying that if you missed it this year, do make sure you take the extra effort to travel to Amsterdam next year. The conference just seems to get better with each passing year. It's a blast to have the chance to sit down with all the people who you chat with on IRC all year long and talk about Blender - and other things.

This year the focus of the conference was on presentations about professional uses for Blender. The Renderfarm.fi talk: "Renderfarm.fi: A year in review", lead by yours truly with technical backup from Jesse "Gekko" Kaukonen, was held on Sunday. We topics such as what we've been doing for the past year, what's new in the rev10 uploader and where we're headed to. Though the talk started with only about 50 people in the room, I think we ended at around a 100 which is a very nice number of Blenderheads. At the time I thought the talk went well, but I'm sure that when the videos emerge (hopefully by the end of the month) I'll again realize which important things I managed to leave out.

Blender Conference 2011 presentation: "Renderfarm.fi: A year in Review"

The presentation went through how things work and gave some nice examples of succesful renders. The key points about our year and future are presented from slide 18 onwards. If you don't have Flash or you're otherwise too busy to read through the slides yourselves, here's things in a nutshell. Done: python script based clients, multi-threading, new uploader (v9), Done but not yet implemented: HDR support, Library support, Screensaver, Coming: Cycles support, cloud rendering and virtualization of clients.

The biggest news regarding the future of our volunteer farm is undeniably the fact that we are now officially funded by the European Union through our participation in the SCI-BUS (SCIentific gateway Based User Support) project that is funded from the Funding Programme 7 Research Infrastructures programme. This funding has enabled me to hire Blender core developer Nathan "jesterKing" Letwory in to the role of lead developer for the next year. Jesse "Gekko" Kaukonen and BURP creator Janus "Jbk" Kristensen will continue with us as consultants. This sudden increase in developer firepower should mean that in a year from now Renderfarm.fi will truly be an exciting open source platform for solving rendering needs.

Finally and as we were in Amsterdam with the whole Studio Lumikuu team, it was time to start the hype for an up-and-coming original production that the studio is preparing. The production is probably going to mark a benchmark for the farm as we'll be putting the technology to the ultimate test. Can Renderfarm.fi handle a real professional studio grade production? Once the production on this begins we will release a screensaver through which you will be able to receive sneak peeks of not only the rendering side of things, but also concept art and photos. Hopefully Studio Lumikuu's adoption and embracing of open rendering will not go unnoticed and a lot more professional studios will start to think of the concept as a viable alternative to private rendering.

Studio Lumikuu at Blender Conference 2011 (left to right): Nathan Letwory, Janne Karhu, Hannu Hoffrén, Mats Holmberg, Julius Tuomisto

Loads of cool stuff took place at the Blender Conference. For example, Delicode (a small two-man venture by Janne "jahka" Karhu and yours truly) also demonstrated the Microsoft Kinect based "Kinect see, Bunny do" demo (check out our old video here). This time I decided not to write a full report here as most of the best stuff was covered in the awesome article posted by Thomas "DingTo" Dinges. I will post the talk in another blog post as soon as it becomes available on Youtube. Meanwhile check out our official Renderfarm.fi Flickr photo album for photos from Amsterdam.

PS. In case you are visiting FSCONS (Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit) next weekend in Göteborg, Sweden, please do find me. I will be there representing Laurea UAS, Renderfarm.fi and Studio Lumikuu. I will be showing off a preview of the up-and-coming "BBB explains Creative Commons" video we've been creating for the past two months. Naturally you can see parts of the video rendered in the gallery! :)

The summer of year 2011 was filled with action. Our team was focused on getting some desperately wanted features in, updating both the hardware and software, performing some long overdue repairs and visiting some conferences. We had two additional developers as interns at the farm (Eero Salminen who worked on the sceensaver and Davis Sorenson who handles some Drupal and website matters) in addition to our usual crew. In midst of this small team we managed to get quite a bit done!

New developments

First of all is probably our most visible new feature: the screensaver! Eero worked on this all the summer and managed to make something that is almost finished for the Windows platforms. On other operating systems you will have to wait a bit longer as the screensaver is still largely in testing, but we are for sure making those if at all possible. The screensaver is ready for deployment and will be probably available for Windows testing soon. Please report any issues you have with it.

An important upgrade was our server hardware. We moved large parts of the system in a new hard drive, and I can assure you that we no longer are going down due to hard drive issues. The fantastic Otaverkko officially became our sponsor by hosting our system and managing some parts of the backups. In addition we did some big overhauls in the server in general, but these shouldn't be visible to the end user. I can only promise that system is more stable than ever before!

I was personally involved in getting multithreading operational for the rendering clients. This is supported to a good degree at the BOINC side, and BURP already has this support for Windows and Linux machines. I had my difficulties in getting the OS X machines working though, but eventually that succeeded. Multithreading should mean that your BOINC clients no longer launch multiple instances of Blender if you have a multicore machine, but instead allocates all available cores for one task. This means that your memory usages have just gone down by a great quantity, and you no longer have to do maths to make sure your computer doesn't turn into marmelade due to your BOINC allocating memory for multiple Blender instances.

Blender support now and in the future

We ended up skipping building Blender 2.58 (first one we did in the whole series) rendering clients entirely as we were largely occupied with other matters. However, we now have the 2.59 clients ready and they should be doing their crunching on your computers right now. Thanks to the new command line rendering script mentioned above we are able to make new Blender clients in an easier fashion and can use the official Blender releases instead of always compiling our own versions and managing our own custom Blender with our command line rendering changes in its source code. This means that in future we should be able to make new releases a lot faster.

Other activities

During the summer Julius was at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, Canada, while I visited Assembly 2011 here in Finland and the annual BOINC workshop, this time held at the Max Planck Insitute in Hannover, Germany. At SIGGRAPH and Assembly we were spreading the love in forms of Blender DVDs and Renderfarm.fi posters. The Blender DVDs, printed in collaboration with Studio Lumikuu and the Blender Foundation, turned out to be in great demand at all the events. In total we gave out 1700 DVD's in these events! At the BOINC workshop I had a small presentation about Renderfarm.fi in addition to writing some code and discussing with many of the main BOINC developers. I also took a look at how the upcoming Virtual Machine support in BOINC is advancing. Even though things look promising, we will not be deploying VM's anytime soon. There are still too many outstanding issues for Renderfarm.fi to switch to using them right at this moment.

So what's next? At least making the screensaver also available for both OS X and Linux, library support for fluids and other simulations (Janus has already worked a lot on this, but this still requires some code so you can actually use it), Blender 2.60 clients and save states. In addition we will of course keep on improving the uploader script, kill bugs as they are found and help artists in the creation of their 3D art. Meanwhile, thanks for flying with Renderfarm.fi and keep on crunching!

Backside of the freebie Blender DVD given out at SIGGRAPH and Assembly 2011, original design by Francesco Siddi