Imagine running Blender directly from the cloud, by the clould I’m talking about running Blender off the net instead off your computer.
Like Adobe…where you can run photoshop online, 3D video games that can be played online, and yes…even a music editor that can be run online (no need for a powerful computer), just check this out:
What would the advantages be? Clustered rendering, meaning you use the power of the many computers the hosts have or are connected to, and no one usually renders at the exact time…most users just use the power required to model something, this can be done in the browser, so the combined rendering power of many, will be almost INSTANT when F12 (render) is pressed.
Short answer is yes - blender has run in all sorts of strange environments, from personal experience…
300+ AMD systems on solaris
20+ i7s on debian without graphics cards for renderfarm + OpenGL rendering with Xorg’s dummy driver + mesa software opengl.
Networked over X11
Networked over VNC
so its all pretty much possible, some system integrator just needs to configure everything to work right - this ends up being a fairly big job, and generic cloud computing from what I have seen is still less good then renderfarms which have been around for ages before clouds were hip.
Having instant renderfarm sounds nice until you think of (in most cases), paying for the time on the systems you are using, which makes me think having to prepare you’re project to be sent off to a farm where you pay for what you render - is not such a silly thing, unless you like paying for all you’re test renders.
But again, theres nothing stopping anyone setting this up with blender, blender has been used before to run on cloud solutions and servers too where it can be automated from python. - Someone just needs to spend the time to set it all up.
Could you imagine Google sponsoring 1000+ of their computer clusters for such purposes? This doesn’t have to limit itself to Blender alone, but many opensource projects out there, eg. those that Google sponsors, not to mention possible SoC projects.
Don’t know about google, but for open movie projects getting access to super-computers / clusters was never a problem (we had offers from quite a few who would give us free access), so if you like to take some weeks/months off work to give some cloud company free PR & new application, I’m sure you can find one
Server-side BGE pushing pixels as html5 + OpenGL to weak <coughipadcough> browser plugin-free clients MMO style appeals, especially scaling as compute needs grow with additional players. Distributed Blenderers (sic) working on a single hosted .blend file would help reduce complexity of distributed/cyber studios and hopefully produce better/effective distributed collaboration work flows. For rendering, farms probably a better solution.
there was a project called verse, that I think still is on the roadmap way head, like blender 3.0. Where working on a single blend file over network in realtime, is the goal.
Yep, remember that project, played with it eagerly back in the earlier heydays of Blender, it worked pretty good in the end as well, you could log on a server, watch objects build in real-time, while modelling your own, fun, could spend hours in there.
It’d only be useful when used in a production environment though, with a great asset-browser / manager, that way…the chef animator, director, art-director etc. could check upon finished parts, and steer the entire process towards a speedier finish (not to mention - better quality, more cooperation, less doublework etc.) Yes …verse was, and still is - a real winning idea!
Hell, all they would need to add is a chat box and I’d consider that a multiplayer game. I’d love to sit there and watch other people build stuff while I build something of my own. I think it would be quite fun… Might bring about a new style of tutorial too. Live help with realtime demonstration. Man, think of the possibilities.
The only problem I would see with Cloud computing for Blender is what version of Blender they would use.
The current official Blender trunk? Then what about all the bugfixes and branches on Graphicall? Or are they just gonna put every little revision on the servers so that people can use whatever they want?
I hate the cloud. Cloud computing sux. It’s been pushed in the past and failed, and I hope it fails again. There’s already renderfarms for distributed rendering. If you want the cloud, have at it. Me, NEVER!!!
I agree that putting a lot of data in the “cloud” is really stupid, but using the cloud for big processing applications (Like rendering on Renderfarm.fi) is actually pretty cool, and it works. As far as I can tell I will never give up on having my own hardware, though. That’s for people who really do nothing more than email/social networks/youtube.
Wouldn’t it be cool to set up a Verse server and just have fun on it? That plus an irc for chat could be really cool.
I really like the idea of blender folks pooling their resources to create a “community cloud”, just like SETI@home and all that jazz. Only with greater chances for success
That’s not just a similar idea, that IS the idea behind RenderFarm.fi. (If you’re talking about a SETI@home thing for Blender) In fact RF.fi uses some of the same technology as SETI@home. We’re crunching through sessions quite quickly right now, I advise checking it out.
