When we released our first version of renderBeamer back in 2014, it was major news both for us as a business and obviously for you, our customers. The days when you had to manually prepare your project and send it to our render farm were over. You no longer had to go through a 10 step manual process to get a scene to the render farm and only then have it rendered. Oh, and by the way, the download process was also manual back then.
Now that we have renderBeamer, things are much easier. You can use our DCC plugin to quickly prepare and send the scene, have the project uploaded and the rendered frames downloaded back to you – all automatically. Sounds simple. And it should be. However, the technology under the hood isn’t. And quite honestly, it has been a while since we’ve made a major update to the tech and the visual interface of renderBeamer.
Somewhere around the middle of 2019, we decided it was time for a change. We gathered all feedback and feature requests we’ve collected over the years and came up with the list of things that we thought were needed the most. Many head-scratching, planning, designing, and coding sessions later (aka a few months), we had created something new and quite refreshing.
Just before the holiday break in December 2019, we released the brand new version of renderBeamer.
It goes without saying that renderBeamer app UI prior to December 2019 was hardly user-friendly and that the update was much needed. We know it has taken us a while but it’s here now, and we believe it’s great.
The interface was created with the minimalist approach in mind. It’s clean and straightforward. Everything unneeded has been stripped out or moved to places that make more sense contextually.
In many ways using renderBeamer should be faster now and it is because the interface is easier to navigate, there are proper tips/descriptions put in place, and we added shortcuts like “copy to clipboard” that simply save you time.
Projects that are uploaded are now saved on the list for you to view until you restart the application or clean the list manually. You can see relevant information for each upload task – data sent, compression rate, transfer rate, and estimated time to finish. You can cancel a single task or all uploading tasks if you wish.
After completed upload, renderBeamer will show you a window with the link to submit a render job. You can either click the button or copy the link to clipboard and open it in a web browser.
You now have more control over your downloads. You can either download all projects at once, individual projects or individual files within a project. We improved the download progress, status, and files counter. You can also access your downloaded frames with more ease. If you want to cancel any of the download tasks, you can do that too – also on an individual level.
All the settings are now located in one place and are nicely grouped based on what they do. Upload settings, Download settings, Connection settings, and Advanced, pretty neat huh?
The new setting we made available is auto submit. It’s still a work in progress but it already works perfectly fine with certain 3D applications i.e. Blender, Cinema 4D, LightWave, SketchUp, and Rhino. The idea behind auto submit is that if it’s turned on, you can submit a project and get it rendered in a single click. Auto submit removes all the steps in between like opening the project in the web dashboard, confirming the settings, and submitting the job to render. Instead, you can submit the job right in your 3D application and only look for the notification that the whole process has finished and the frames are ready. Very convenient and a big time saver!
And that concludes this short, yet meaningful renderBeamer product update. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, feel free to email us, chat with us live, or Tweet at us.
Happy rendering!
Lucas B.
