GarageFarm.NET News - Blender plugin update

Hi guys!

Andrew here from GarageFarm.NET

We have just released a new version of our addon for Blender with some great new features, and I wanted to share them here:

  • We added support for Blender 2.80!

IMPORTANT: Because this version of Blender goes through heavy development, please let us know on our 24/7 web chat to add the build which you use to our farm before you start rendering.

  • Our plugin uses symbolic/hard links now instead of copying assets like movie clips and caches – it prepares scenes faster and with smaller disk space usage.

  • We added support for mp4 assets.

  • The plugin supports non-latin characters now.

  • We added Render Cost Calculator to the plugin’s options – you can get a rough cost estimate for your scene right from the plugin. For close cost estimation run a test with a step of your scene on the farm – our auto estimating system will generate a close cost estimate for the whole frame range.

  • We improved the scene checking procedure, and support for multiple cameras.

If you have any questions or doubts I will be happy to answer them.

I encourage you to talk to us on our live chat – we are online 24/7.

You can check how our rendering system works in this quick start video:

If you haven’t tried us yet, you can register with $50 free credits for tests from this webpage: https://garagefarm.net/blender-render-farm/

Happy Rendering!

_Andrew

Hi guys!

Martin here from GarageFarm.NET

Since the last update, we were really busy bees and we’ve just released v37 addon for Blender :slight_smile:
with some great new features, and I wanted to share them here:

NEW FEATURES:

  • We added support for Blender 2.80 Beta

Important: Because this version of Blender goes through heavy development, please let us know on our 24/7 web chat to integrate the build you are using before you start rendering.

  • Our plugin now reports missing cache objects when preparing the scene, for easier tracking and troubleshooting

FIXES:

  • Better handling of atypical characters in output paths (dots)
  • fixed sequence relinking
  • Better handling of linked proxy objects
  • Better relinking for image sequences
  • Improved asset copying during project preparation

If you have any questions or doubts I will be happy to answer them.

I encourage you to talk to us on our live chat – we are online 24/7.

You can check how our rendering system works in this quick start video:

If you haven’t tried us yet, you can register with $50 free credits for tests from this webpage: https://garagefarm.net/blender-render-farm/

Happy Rendering!

Martin

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Hi guys!

Andrew here from GarageFarm.NET

Our devs don’t stop upgrading our plugin. Here is what we have in the new version:

New features:

  • We added support for Lux render (LuxCore)
  • We added better handling for rendering to multiple outputs set up in the compositor
  • We added support for particle caches
  • Our plugin uses a temporary folder when preparing the scene for rendering on the farm. Now you can select the location of this folder.
  • We updated our support for Blender libraries (references) - references that cannot be merged are uploaded with the scene.

Fixes:

  • We improved 2.80.XX versioning

If you have any questions or doubts I will be happy to answer them.

I encourage you to talk to us on our Live Chat – we are online 24/7.

If you haven’t tried us yet, you can register with $50 free credits for tests from this webpage: GarageFarm.NET Blender

Happy Rendering!

Andrew

Hi guys!

Andrew here from GarageFarm.NET

Since our last plugin update, we have released several new versions and added quite a lot of new features and improvements.

General Blender \ New features

  • So far it was necessary to download and install a separate installer for every 3d application we support. We reworked our tools, so now it’s enough to install our Renderbeamer standalone application, and you can install and update the plugins for all the software we support straight from beamer

  • We have added a new feature - super high resolution still shots rendering. Now you can render very high resolution still shots with distributed rendering. The scene will be rendered on multiple nodes and then automatically merged to the final image. All settings can be set directly on Web Manager after scene upload. You can also set bucket size, camera and number of strips to render.

  • We added support for the latest release of Blender 2.80

Fixes

  • We fixed issues with image sequences
  • We added prompt for not supported render engines (Eevee/Workbench)

OTHER NEWS:

We rent powerful GPU servers with a connection via Remote Desktop. The service is called Xesktop, and we offer it as a separate brand, but it’s powered by GarageFarm.NET, with the same 24/7 support.

You’ll need to install your software and use your own licenses as we are not allowed to rent them out. Your system will be saved and stored intact after the initial setup and ready to use any time.

GPU servers specs:

CPU: 2x Intel Xeon CPU E5-2620 v4 @ 2.10 GHz
RAM: 128 GB
GPU:10 x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, 11GB
NVIDIA CUDA Cores: 10 x 3584
OctaneBench 4.00 score: 2075

GPU cost calculator will help you to estimate the cost of the rendering of your project on our setup.

You can register a Xesktop account HERE or if you have an existing GarageFarm.NET account please use it to log in to Xesktop.

After Effects rendering,

  • We support rendering of After Effects projects with our v5 plugin for After effects.

  • Right after finishing the rendering of your scene and adding postproduction in AE, you can upload After Effects project and render your final video on our farm. Of course, you can use the plugin with any AE project you want to render.

  • Our After Effects plugin works on Windows and on Mac

  • We support PSD layered assets, sequence assets, and fonts uploading

  • We support the whole Red Giant plugins suite ( only the CPU plugins will render on our network – for more information please ask us on our WebChat )

If you haven’t checked us yet you can register with $50 free test credits HERE

If you have any questions or in doubt, I will be happy to answer you here. You can also use live chat on our website, where you will get an immediate response. We are online 24/7.

Happy Rendering!

Andrew

Hi guys!

Andrew here from GarageFarm.NET

We have very good news! We have been working hard last several months and put together lots of powerful tools for our users. Here are some of them:

1. General Blender

  • We bought Flip Fluids add-on and soon will add it to our farm

  • We added Blender resolution check for stripes rendering.

  • We added Bender camera name injection to paths

2. New farm features:

We increased node limits on all priorities: Now you can get more rendering power for the same price. :slight_smile:

  • The default priority has been changed from High to Medium. Also, most recently selected priority is remembered for every new scene.

3. We added new cool features to our Web Manager:

Your scripts can be executed from the “Advanced settings” menu before rendering. Scripts are executed “per-job”. Users need to contact with our support team to add custom scripts (we are online on chat 24/7)

  • if you want you can limit the number of nodes allocated to your job ( for example for test purposes, or to distribute your nodes on Low priority in the way you want )

Render Progress Tab is divided into three sections:

Below you can find a small preview of the new Web Manager feature.

Please note that it’s still an early version and that we’ll be continuously working on making it better. Tell us what you think!

4. We added new cool features to our renderBeamer.

In a normal workflow, you need to set the job in submit window after upload to add it to the queue. It has many cool options, but in case you want to render 20 cameras from the scene, the process gets tedious. With auto-submit you just upload the jobs to the farm and they are automatically added to the queue with default options.

No Tetris yet, but it’s on the list :wink:

100% clean uninstallation

It shortly explains the options of the uploader.

This option allows you to install the plugin even if you are offline, prepare the scene with the plugin and then upload it with FTP ( for example if your company IT rules are blocking renderBeamer.) You can even copy a project to a different computer and upload it with FTP and add it to the queue.

__________________________________________________________________________________

If you haven’t checked us yet you can register with $50 free test credits HERE

If you have any questions or in doubt, I will be happy to answer you in this thread. You can also use Live-chat on our website, where you will get an immediate response. We are online 24/7.

Happy Rendering!

Andrew

Hi guys.

Andrew here from GarageFarm.NET.

I give away info about GarageFarm.NET (cloud render farm) and Xesktop.com, (GPU servers rental service) Black Friday promos:

Time: Nov 29, 2019 - Dec 5, 2019 Get extra free credits when paying these amounts:

$100 +10% = 110 credits
$250 +25% = 312 credits
$500 + 30% = 650 credits
$1000 + 40% - 1400 credits

Please note that the Black Friday bonus credits for GarageFarm.NET and Xesktop are added on top of regular discounts which you can find on the services web pages ( Price > Discount )

Hi guys!

Andrew here from GarageFarm.NET team.

It took a while, but we’re happy to announce our new support for high resolution still image rendering for Blender at the farm!

We render your stills at a fraction of the time by dividing it, distributing it among nodes and merging it back together again. Watch it in action in our latest tutorial!

Happy rendering!

Hi Guys,

I’ve been running some benchmarks of different blender render farms and you guys come out looking really good (especially your Xesktop service). I’ve posted the results in this blender artist thread so you can check them out:

So far I have only test your 10x Nvidia 1080Ti GPU Xesktop machines but I’ll make sure to give the V100s a try as well (no nodes were available when I tried last night).

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Hey! Thanks for letting us know. We’ll definitely check out the results. I’m curious now how the V100 server would fare on this benchmark.

Btw, that’s a lot of work you have put into this :slight_smile: :+1:


Lucas

1 Like

Hi guys!

Andrew here from GarageFarm.NET

We never stop upgrading our tools. You can watch our new tools overview in this video:

And here is a list of new features which we added on the last several months:

1. General Blender

  • We added support for Flip Fluids caches
  • We added support for uploading projects with packed assets
  • We added support for new Mantaflow fluid caches in Blender 2.82+

2. New farm features:

Selected download will be automatically redirected from Web Manager to renderBeamer downloads tab.

To use it, just double click on one of your frames or any image texture in the file browser (left section in the Projects panel) or use “Image Preview” under RMB

  • We added copy job path option (available under RMB on the selected job in Web Manager)

  • We added the resolution aspect ratio lock in the job submission window

  • We added the “End time” column in the jobs table

  • We added Job node limit in the job submission window

Download:

  • We added an option to download only specific files
  • We added an option to cancel downloading of a single file, an option of sorting downloads by column and added date column in the downloads tab
  • We added a button (folder icon) to open downloads directories

Upload:

  • The finished uploads will now remain on the upload list
  • We expanded the auto-submit feature.

Users can set default priority and render nodes groups for auto-submit jobs.

  • We added option to launch renderBeamer on every system startup (Windows, Mac)
  • We added option to choose action on renderBeamer window close (minimize to tray or close application
  • Multiple plugins can now be downloaded and installed in parallel at the same time
  • We added warning about switch “Render Single Layer” (this switch doesn’t work from cmd line rendering)
  • We fixed an issue with checking auto-run-python-scripts setting. Now plugin shows prompt only when a script is employed in scene
  • We fixed issues with permissions required to copy Flip Fluids caches on macOS
  • We fixed copying fluid cache
  • We handled Icon\r system file on OSX causing uploads to fail, this file will be omitted now
  • We fixed logging into chat without “remember me” option

If you haven’t checked us yet you can register with $50 free test credits HERE

If you have any questions or in doubt, I will be happy to answer you in this thread. You can also use Live-chat on our website, where you will get an immediate response. We are online 24/7.

Happy Rendering!

Andrew

Hi guys!

Andrew here from GarageFarm.NET.

The year 2020 is coming to an end, and it was a hard year for sure. We decided to make lemonade from a rainfall of lemons, focused on our dust-covered ‘future features’ list and added as many of them to the farm as we could.

So here are some updates from GarageFarm.NET that will make using our service easier and give you new tools to render the scenes exactly as you want.

1. New farm features and hardware.

We increased node limits for priorities, so you get more rendering power for the same price:

  • HIGH priority - We increased the maximum number of nodes from 150 to 300 per job.

  • MEDIUM priority - We increased the maximum number of nodes from 75 to 150 per job.

  • LOW priority We increased the maximum number of nodes from 50 to 100 for all your jobs on Low.

  • We added more CPU nodes, and they are various models so in general, we offer 20K rendering cores.
  • We added a 512 GB RAM node. There is only one now because it rarely happens today that the scenes need more than 256GB (which is our upper limit in general). But in case your scene doesn’t fit even in 256GB we can render it on 512GB.
  • Please note that for all Blender job a 33% price discount is applied automatically during rendering.

2. Blender rendering and plugin updates:

New features:

  • We added support for Blender 2.91 – please note that we can add support for new Blender version very quickly – just let us know on our Live-chat
  • We added support for uploading projects with packed assets
  • We added support for VDB sequences, UDIM textures, and UDIM sequences with a suffix.
  • We Added support for Super Image Denoiser node - please choose the version of Blender with this addon installed in Web Manager submit window or ask for details on our live chat.
  • We added support for reading Blender Effects from the scene and forwarding the information to the farm.
  • We added “Path Tracing Sample” render progress for Blender 2.91+
  • We added support for new Mentaflow fluid caches in Blender 2.82+

Fixes:

  • We fixed issues with image sequence not relinked in compositor nodes
  • We fixed an issue with VDB cache and IES assets (upload & relinking)
  • We Fixed issue with file output node with relative path
  • We Fixed issue with unsupported characters in cameras names and copying fluid cache

3. renderBeamer updates (our uploader\downloader tool)

  • We added option to use download directory selected in the scene. To use the new feature we have added “use scene download path” switch in renderBeamer settings. That option makes beamer more production-friendly so you can download the renders from a particular scene into that scene’s directory – the same as most artists do when rendering locally.
  • We added Korean language support.
  • We expanded our ‘auto-submit’ feature. (it allows you to add many jobs to the queue without using the submit window). We added “add as paused” option, custom script support, and option to edit default auto-submit template.
  • We added download progress info for downloading our plugins.
  • We added an option to launch renderBeamer on every system startup (Windows, Mac), and an option to choose action on renderBeamer window close (minimize to tray or close application.)
  • We added plugin temp directory defined in beamer settings.
  • We added drag selection for upload, download, log entries (select an entry and drag the mouse to select multiple)We added downloads sorting by column, date column in downloads and a button (folder icon) to open downloads directories.

4. Web Manager updates (our jobs management web dashboard)

  • We improved farm queue info, now we show whole farm queue, as well as queue before your highest job and the queue before the selected job.
  • We added “show progress” function in jobs panel. Now, you can easily open the real-time progress panel by just selecting a job. When using “show progress” option, the panel will open automatically, even if it’s closed.
  • We added high RAM usage notification, you can also get it as email notification if you set it in your account’s profile in “receive render status e-mail notifications.”
  • We added multiple emails notifications – if you coworkers need to get the notifications as well, you can add more notification emails to your account profile.
  • We added image preview for EXR, CXR and FXR. Also, EXRs are now converted to JPGs on the fly, and correctly displayed for faster preview.
  • We added an option change node groups under RMB.
  • We added “submit using Web Manager” option in the uploads context menu.
  • We added support for starting multiple downloads by selecting them on Web Manager.
  • We added default custom script – if you are using a custom script in your job, you can set in in your account settings, so you don’t have to add it to every job manually.
  • We added a cool new feature to Web Manager - video sequence creation.

To create video sequence from rendered frames, just browse to “Renders” folder in Web Manager file browser panel and use “Create video sequence” under RMB. Next, just set desired video options like format, codec, bitrate and so on, and submit video sequence job to render. Once it’s done, just download video job from renderBeamer.

Video creation feature interface:

Some of the new features we have recently added to the video creation option:

  • FFmpeg framerate now supports fractions.
  • we added pixel format setting, different formats are available for each encoder.
  • we added profiles for DNxHD and h265 encoders, added HAP encoder and profiles, added mxf, changed h264 and h265 encoders to not use quicksync, added AV1 encoder requiring experimental flag.

5. Cloud GPU rendering.

So far we supported GPU rendering only on our Xesktop powerful GPU servers, where you could work and render remotely after installing your software yourself.

We recently launched cloud GPU rendering. It works the same way as cloud CPU rendering, but the frames are rendered on nodes with 8x Tesla K80 12GB cards on each.

We support Blender Cycles and LuxCore rendering on the GPU cloud!

CPU/GPU render farm cost calculator

We added automatic recognition of used rendering method (GPU\CPU) and automatic setting of buckets\tiles sizes for the best rendering performance

6. Xesktop updates - Powerful GPU servers for rental

We now offer three types of GPU servers (We have recently added P100 servers) and cut on the prices per hour of usage:

Node type 1 - $6/h

  • 10x Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080Ti 11GB,
  • OctaneBench 4: 2093
  • CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5 v4 8-core 3.0 GHz,
  • RAM: 256 GB

Node type 2 - $8/h

  • 8x Nvidia Tesla V100 16GB
  • OctaneBench 4: 3037
  • CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5 v4 10-core 3.2 GHz
  • RAM: 256 GB

Node type 3 - $6.5/h

  • 8x Nvidia Tesla P100 16GB
  • OctaneBench 4: 2055
  • CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5 v4 10-core 3.2 GHz
  • RAM: 256 GB
  • We accelerated the system image creating and booting process.[/B]
  • We vastly improved the DCC’s viewports performance[/B] by adding Quadro P1000 cards (this card accelerates OpenGL) and launching OpenGL RDP enabler from Nvidia at every boot. Now the viewports performance is limited only by your internet connection.
  • We installed the newest Windows version 20H2 on new system images.

Xesktop GPU cost calculator will help you to estimate the cost of the rendering of your project on our setup. You can register a Xesktop account HERE or if you have an existing GarageFarm.NET account use it to log in to Xesktop.

If you have any questions, our team of wranglers is online 24/7. Just give us a shout on our 24\7 Live Webchat

If you haven’t checked our Blender cloud farm yet you can register with $50 free test credits HERE

And for fun a short trailer of a very cool movie made by Snowgum films which we helped rendering, ‘The Troll Bridge’

Happy rendering!

Andrew

1 Like