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:
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HIGH priority - We increased the maximum number of nodes from 150 to 300 per job.
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MEDIUM priority - We increased the maximum number of nodes from 75 to 150 per job.
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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