Another year has come to a close, and as always, the time has come to step back and appreciate all of the new developments and milestones our hard-working team has engendered. Here are some of 2019’s highlights, guaranteed to make Garagefarm.NET and all associated services even friendlier solutions in the year 2020!
Our render farm has grown in size again. We have installed a lot of new 4x CPU 176 core render nodes bringing our CPU farm to the total of 20,000 CPU cores.
The number of cores will keep increasing in 2020.
This has lead to a significant change in nodes we offer our users on each priority.
– High priority nodes increased from 80 to 150, with up to 240GB RAM
– Medium priority nodes increased from 40 to 75, with up to 240GB RAM
– Low priority nodes increased from 10 to 50
Another exciting and unofficial bit of news is that we’ll be adding nodes with GPU cards to our farm. It’s still super secret so we can’t tell you more at this time, but stay tuned!
While we’ve been providing low key server rental support in the past, we’ve refined our infrastructure and finally launched Xesktop – our GPU server rental service.
Xesktop is a very powerful yet surprisingly simple solution to GPU rendering dependent workflows. It is available for any CG artist to use through an easy to use software at an unbeatable price.
We have two types of servers that can be used to accelerate anything from GPU rendering for 3d programs to heavy calculations needed for any other application that could benefit from the hardware.
1) 10x GTX 1080Ti 11GB vRAM
2) 8x Tesla V100 16GB vRAM
Cinema 4D and After Effects are an integral part of any mograph artist’s toolkit and we’ve seen how fast the industry is growing. The same is true when it comes to the popularity this software combo gained on our farm.
Our C4D plugin development focus took 2nd spot after 3ds Max, being the most popular software used on our farm. We added support for X-Particle caches and improved our handling of caches for Turbulence FD. We’ve also added support for the entire Red Giant plugin suite for our After Effects users.
We brought back support for Eon VUE. Some time ago, Eon Software released a new and improved VUE line and we were able to update our support as of 2019.
We introduced a new feature – auto-submit. Now your scenes can be automatically added to rendering without using the standard job submission procedure.
We increased download speed for single files by using multiple connections. Good news for users rendering high resolution still images. Now stills download much faster.
We added render node progress panel. Now, you can monitor render progress of each frame in real-time and easily access various data and log files.
We rebuilt renderBeamer’s interface and added a lot of new features.
Here are some more numbers to give you an overview of what we’ve been up to at a glance!
Our Blender user base has always been steadily growing, but the software’s momentous releases over the past year have brought droves of new users to the farm. Needless to say, we got caught up in the haze of excitement around Blender, and made some long-overdue improvements to our support:
We also were one of the first farms to introduce support for Blender 2.8+ and even accommodated users who needed nightly builds integrated, upon request.
We implemented a 33% discount for all Blender users rendering on the farm, which took effect February last year, and met some amazing people from the Blender Community through our tutorials and live streams. Shout out to Joni Mercado, Victor Duarte, Midge “the Mantissa” Sinnaeve, Lech Sokolowsky and Fabio Palvelli for being such gracious guests, and bringing some industry wisdom to our little neighborhood!
The community has been both very warm and patient, and we’re still in disbelief at the fact that somehow we managed to garner around 3000 subscribers on our channel at the end of the year! Holy smokes!
And to top it all off, Blender users can now render their high resolution still images over multiple nodes!
One of the most exciting things we cooked up last year was our premiere asset solution for Archviz designers using 3ds Max and Sketchup!
3DBee.IT is a team of 3D artists and developers who have come together to create an asset library of beautiful interior models and high fidelity materials and scans for 3ds Max and Sketchup users with their favorite render engines.
We’re putting our focus on assets that are often needed to furnish interior scenes, which take time to create whether due to complexity or sheer volume. Our catalog includes hand made 3D models of chairs, desks, cabinets, tables, appliances and more. We also provide optimized 3D scans of various items and materials that you can embellish your room with. Our 3D assets are made to coexist nicely in different sections of a living or working space.
Our library is accessed through our 3D asset manager application that allows users to drag and drop models directly into their 3ds Max and Sketchup projects. Our 3D assets come with various texture sets already assembled into your render engine’s shader, which means they are ready to render as soon as they’re placed in a scene.
In last year’s Total Chaos conference our delegates Michal, Kate and Martin had a great time meeting new faces, getting up to date on the latest updates from Chaos Group, and catching up with some of our users. Good times!
And that’s that! 2020 is here and we’ve hit the ground running. We guarantee even more features and good news in the coming months, so stay tuned. If you’ve used any of our services, we thank you for being a part of our year. As always, Happy Rendering from all of us at GarageFarm.NET!
