Seeing so much of awesome renderings done with the Cycles engine, I’ve decided to make something useful - to let you guys speed up your work (namely: render times).
It took a while, but recently I’ve managed to finish a first public version of an Online Accelerator for Cycles - RayPump in short
RayPump has been officially presented on Yet Another Blender Conference 2013 in Poland, so some of you might already know about it
Some interesting features, that makes it something completely different from “classic” render-farms:
trivial to use;
heavy optimized data transfer;
free;
So, if you would like to try RayPump by yourself, check details at http://www.raypump.com
I hope you like it, and even if not - let me know why:)
I was wondering if this is like renderfarm.fi. Like… do we have to share our GPU and CPU usage with other users? because I have a very old computer, and I am VERY interested in this but I can’t afford sharing the CPU power and my GPU is GTX 9800+ which can’t be used with Cycles.
Wow SuperMelon this is amazing! I can’t believe there hasn’t been a bigger response. I just registered and uploaded my first render. It works excellent on Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit and the addon is very straight forward. One thing I can’t seem to find in the FAQ section is how to render out an animation. It seems as though when I set up my file as usual I would just input start and end frames but it only rendered a single frame… SUPER FAST!!!
thanks so much for allowing us to test this! Do you mind me asking what are your plans for the future? Is this a testing ground for a commercial service?
lol
i used this today… i was looking at benchmarks and i saw a gpu with a website as the name so i googled it and rendered an an image on it
it was lovely
ok, I downloaded it since it didn’t say anything about sharing the CPU power for reasons mentioned before. And I gotta admit… this is pretty amazing! it renders extremely fast!! that is something I never expected on a machine like mine XD
HOWEVER! there are a few things that it couldn’t render. Like SSS objects, strands, and animations.
here is a picture of an SSS object that took my computer more than an hour to render
but I was rendering on the CPU besides, you can see that the eye in the second picture does have the SSS property along the border
does that mean that even if I chose CPU on my computer, it would still render using the GPU on the server computer (or whatever it is called :P)?
First, thanks to all of you for positive response. Glad to see it’s working - can’t wait for more feedback! :RocknRoll:
Second - I do encourage you to read the FAQ section on RayPump site. Most asked questions are answered there already. There is also a small feedback forum, which already might be handy (and if not, start new thread there - it would be easier to find for other users).
Third - despite that, I’d like to answer some questions here:
Mac support :yes: - of course, there will be Release Pack for Mac. RayPump itself compiles and runs under OS X already - but I still have to figure out some minor issues. So, you will be able to run RP on Mac by the end of this month. Probably sooner.
RayPump supports Cycles GPU supported set :no: only - even if you send a job set with CPU (or Blender Internal) it will be switched to Cycles/GPU. So - make sure you know what runs on GPU.
So, once again thanks for responses. Happy blending! (or should I say “happy pumping”? )
I’ve made some clean up in FAQ section, hopefully making it bit more readable :o
As for the background - service is in fact at testing stage. Its purpose is to deliver some easy, reliable and actually fast “render-farm like” solution for Blender.
RayPump already has some interesting solutions implemented, there are more to come. To make things right, I have to build really solid and well tested bases first, then introduce new features. Well, this is a very first phase with live users online - with hundreds of their hardware/network/Blender configurations.
As for the future: free service should remain (with the restrictions set similar to current) and once I’m happy with test results, some more sophisticated service (RayPump Pro, perhaps) should be announced.
Wow, I rendered a big scene with lot of geometry and strands in CPU mode and it was really fast.
Test it on windows 8 64bit.
Raypump support animations or only still images?
If you read through the FAQ it says there is no support for animations.
“no animations - only first frame of the scene gets rendered*;”
The fact that there is an asterisk next to that sentence makes me hopefull that animations will be supported one day.
“*-marked restrictions might be changed or removed. System management software will adjust some of the limitations, as this phase of the project continues, feeding more of statistic data to the system.”
Either way, I’m looking forward to trying this out and thank the Ray Pump team for their work and making this free.
Guys, I’ve got a favour to ask. I’m not much of an artist myself - so currently Gallery on RayPump.com shows not much of the content (just the test scenes, actually).
that is something I never expected on a machine like mine XD
(took 17:3 minutes! WITH ONLY 50 SAMPLES!! D:>)
besides, you can see that the eye in the second picture does have the SSS property along the border