Renderfarm "v2" features

Hello!

The site looks interesting now, but almost all is gone, forum is empty, accounts are empty, etc.
Only the gallerys are accessible as far as I can see.
How can I get access to my account information? Are my previously crunched credits gone?

Hi DoctorNow,

Sorry for not making this clear before. All credits are still there (we will make them visible hopefully during this week) and all functionality will be back in one form or another. What we are basically doing is "drupalizing" the web side of BURP (meaning the gallery) and some BOINC features (such as the community stuff, like friends, which are nice but rather undeveloped). We also decided to "drupalize" the forum in order to later gain from the various modules available. I promise we'll look into the possibility of somehow importing the old posts to the new system.

Anyway don't worry for the crunched credits or any other credit related activities. We're still very much a BOINC service, we are just aiming to make the service (and BOINC with it) more attractive for users that come from the 3D visualization field.

Please feel free to ask and to propose changes also in the future.

Everybody can now see their normal BOINC statistics on their user page (just click the corresponding logo on the toolbar - we'll put aids to the toolbar soon). We will bring the corresponding info about others also available soon.

-Julius

hi everybody,

The look of the site is slick and modern now, which is a huge improvement, but when can we expect to have some basic rendering going. I believe we didn't have anything to render for a good amount of months now and it should be a good thing to be back to the main purpose of the ORE project.

Actually it would be an interesting thing to hear what course the project is taking and what can we expect in the near/foreseeable future. Are there plans to grow the project and become a more of a semi-professional rendering method aimed mainly on the computer graphics students, independent artists or hobbyists giving them an alternative to the rather expensive render farms, or it will it have more of a social role of getting people together and working together.

Greetings, bned

Can the way posts are display be changed? I find top-posting rather annoying, especially when the original post is right there at the top. I checked under the "Your Account" section, but it seems that the Forum Preferences are not there.

@bned,

Currently the focus has been mostly on getting the new website up and running and to put into use some of the added functionality offered, but unfortunately as things usually go, bugs show up. Currently we are missing some of the animations already rendered because of some issues with the XMLRPC through which our script imports content from BURP. Probably this will not prove to be a huge issue and will be solved ASAP. After the XMLRPC and the script are talking between each other like they should, we will automatize the creation of Drupal "nodes" from the BURP animations (so once work on an animation finishes it will be automatically updated to our gallery - we are currently not doing this).

Now what are we trying to achieve with Renderfarm.fi and what is the aim of this work is to create an environment which could actually serve as both. My own vision for the service is to take BURP/BOINC functionality and try to wrap it up in a kind of a social (media) environment that would not only enable creativity, but support collaboration over 3D graphic in new ways.

As to your primary question, I realize that it would be arrogant of me to come to the BOINC community and try to propose that the things that we are doing were some how new. However, after meeting some of the people chiefly responsible for making BOINC the wonderful thing that it is (I went to last year's Pan-Galactic Boinc Conference in Grenoble with Janus Kristensen) I realized that there's alot of interesting research to be made about how tools like BURP/BOINC could be used in order to support creative processes. Please correct me if you feel I'm wrong, but isn't BURP quite unique in its way of combining BOINC in order not make science - but culture?

Because of these reasons my personal vision (and a vision I'm sure Janus and all the other people who've been working in this project at least partly agree to) for the service is that it's a kind of a experiment in creating a social media out of BOINC - in a way trying to take it to a new level. Not from a scientific perspective, but a human one.

Making a long answer an even longer one I think that our long term aim lies definitely in enabling university students to make better quality renders, but also in supporting small companies and graphics freelancers to showcase their graphical skills and possibly do some real commercially potential work on the service. I think that the time is quite ripe and peoples attitudes have shifted to support openness and open licenses like the Creative Commons.

It's a long way to go still, but I hope you will stick with us. However I understand the need for renders. We were planning to have host a small competition on the server for getting Assembly 2009 tickets (http://www.assembly.org). Although time is running low, I hope this will go through and we will get some stuff rendering on the service during this week. More about this in a while.

We're also going to host a (hopefully) world-wide competition for rendering the logo for Star Wreck Studios's Wreckamovie.com communal movie making service. This should happen starting from september. (btw. SWS just won the World Summit Awards - previous Finnish winner was Sulake with it's HabboHotel service in 2003, http://blog.starwreck.com/category/wreckamovie/). These competitions will hopefully give us rendering tasks in the foreseeable future.

@Noderaser,

I added the menu so it's always under the thread. You should also be able to save your own preferences through it.

-Julius

Hi all,

Good news. We'll be updating the gallery with all the missing animations during the next days. Also we will now hopefully get quite some stuff for you guys to crunch.

I'm also happy to tell you that Renderfarm.fi will be represented in force in the upcoming Assembly 2009 demo convention, one of the oldest and most veneered in Scandinavia. You can read more about assembly at http://www.assembly.org/summer09/assembly-1?set_language=en. If we are successful in our promotion there (we have some fun stuff planned), we should have many more crunchers and even more so, I hope that we will have many more new Blender users aware of the possibilities of BURP.

Nathan (jesterKing) and me will also be presenting Renderfarm.fi and talk about the upload script in the ArtTech seminar which will be held at the same time. Our presentation will be on saturday at 13.00 Finnish time (that is CET+2) and it will be available as video-on-demand. Nathan will also be demoing Blender 2.5, which he has been developing.

Blender 2.5 promises to offer BURP and Renderfarm.fi a very cool boost in usability, as the uploader script written by Nathan can be integrated almost seamlessly into the menu structure of Blender. In fact, we will probably be releasing some sort of a Renderfarm.fi version of Blender after 2.5 reaches official release (hopefully by september 2009). This could potentially mean a dramatic increase in usability and increase work loads on this server and finally give everybody some nice crunching to do.

I'll write more details about our ventures into Assembly 2009 as soon as I have the time. You can also expect daily updates and a full report about the convention on this site. For me personally, this is the fourth Assembly I've been to, but it's been 12 years since my last one (I remember going through 1994 to 1997). I'm eagerly anticipating both the demo compos and the possibility to advertise the service to over 7000 people who are very much into computer graphics.

Cheers,

-Julius